ClickHouse Acquires Xata

Xata is joining ClickHouse to add instant provisioning, copy-on-write branching, and scale-to-zero compute to ClickHouse Managed Postgres. The combination targets a bottleneck created by AI-assisted development: each pull request, coding-agent run, or deployment preview needs an isolated database with production-like data, but conventional cloning is slow and costly. Xata says its branches can be created in about three seconds even for databases with terabytes of data; branches use independent compute and share underlying storage until changes are made. Idle databases can suspend and wake in about a second, and production data can be anonymized for safer development. These features let teams create many temporary environments without paying to duplicate entire databases.

The acquisition brings together ClickHouse Managed Postgres, built for fast, long-running production workloads on local NVMe, and Xata’s infrastructure for fleets of short-lived databases. Both use unmodified Postgres. Xata’s storage engine uses ZFS volumes over NVMe/TCP, while warm compute pools speed provisioning and wake-ups. ClickHouse is also integrating Postgres with its analytical database through replication and a unified query layer, connecting transactional and analytical workloads. Xata customers can keep using the service for now, and new sign-ups remain open; customers will eventually move to ClickHouse Managed Postgres after feature parity is reached. Branching, scale-to-zero, and an agent-focused tier are planned for ClickHouse Managed Postgres.