Advice on analytics for web traffic

First of all - great job. I need to check this out for one of my side-projects. Looks awesome.

Out of interest, have you thought about using TimescaleDB? It is just PSQL extension so the migration should be simpler. In addition there are works on adding columnar store to PostgreSQL as well, so this may be interesting for you.

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In my testing, Clickhouse blew TimescaleDB out of the water for query performance. I think it’s mostly because TimescaleDB doesn’t do anything to optimize COUNT DISTINCT which make up almost all queries in Plausible. Clickhouse has distinct counts insanely optimized if you can spare some accuracy.

TimescaleDB looks great and I love the fact that it’s ‘just Postgres’. If it was just a tiny bit more mature I think it would be ideal for my use case.

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HyperLogLog?

I am not saying that you should change back, I am just saying that there are tools to make it fast in PostgreSQL as well.

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Have you tried TimescaleDB with Ecto? Curious to get somebody’s experience.

As for columnar, you’ve got one good option available now with Citus cstore.

In the future, there will probably be something from cloudfare, similar to plausible.io, does without cookies. For users of cloudfare, this can probably be used now, for others there is a waiting list.

Cloudfare Web Analytics

Just for your information, I have not used it yet.