The world’s fastest tool for querying JSON files

ClickHouse is a single binary that enables fast processing on local and remote files using SQL, effectively providing database features without a database. It supports the full breadth of ClickHouse functions and JSON file format. A benchmark was conducted by Daniel Moura to compare various command-line tools for querying large files, with results showing that clickhouse-local outperformed other tools, including SPySQL, jq, trdsql, Miller, OctoSQL, spqrk-sql, Pandas, and DSQ. The benchmark focused on three challenges: Map, Aggregation/Reduce, and Subset/Filter, which assess the tool's ability to process files quickly. ClickHouse recently introduced features such as semi-structured data storage and automatic schema inference, making it easy to process JSON files and reproduce this benchmark. The updated results show clickhouse-local to be significantly faster than most other tools for querying large JSON files, with OctoSQL excelling on smaller files.