Why Redshift Serverless can’t match ClickHouse Cloud for real-time analytics

CostBench compared ClickHouse Cloud and Redshift Serverless during continuous ingestion of 113.2 billion stock-market quotes, measuring data-preparation cost, query-serving cost, and accumulated query runtime while aggregate queries ran every ten minutes and drill-downs hourly. Using ClickHouse asynchronous inserts and Redshift streaming ingestion from Amazon MSK with materialized views, the benchmark reported that ClickHouse had lower modeled preparation costs ($28.69 versus $522.03), lower allocated query costs (about $0.05 versus $24.97), and less cumulative query runtime (58.12 seconds versus 1.69 hours), producing a calculated 1,996-fold performance-per-dollar advantage under its scoring formula. The comparison attributes much of the difference to ClickHouse sorting raw data and updating summaries as inserts are processed, whereas Redshift’s streaming view, background sorting, and downstream materialized-view refreshes operate as separate stages, leaving drill-down queries able to encounter less-prepared data and aggregate queries dependent on the most recently completed refresh. ClickHouse reportedly completed drill-down workloads 112 times faster and aggregation workloads 70.8 times faster in the tested setup, although the results rely on specified capacity assumptions, a 32-RPU modeled Redshift writer scenario derived from later characterization, and Redshift’s live streaming-view read path rather than its separately maintained typed projection.

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