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ByConity/ByConity
ByConity is an open source cloud data warehouse
ByConity is a ClickHouse fork from ByteDance that added compute-storage separation, a custom query optimizer, and Snowflake-influenced multi-tenant architecture on top of ClickHouse v21.8. It is officially end-of-life: the retirement period started June 1, 2026, and the repo goes read-only August 1, 2026. Do not adopt this.
The compute-storage separation design was genuinely interesting — separating stateless workers from shared storage (S3) is a real architectural improvement over stock ClickHouse's tight coupling. Using FoundationDB as the metadata store was a deliberate choice that gave strong transactional guarantees for catalog operations. The query optimizer work they published was more sophisticated than ClickHouse's at the time of the fork. The Kubernetes deployment story via Helm charts was better documented than most C++ database projects.
The project is dead — EOL'd, going read-only in weeks, with no security patches after August 2026 and no migration path to an open-source equivalent. It forked from ClickHouse 21.8 (2021), meaning it permanently missed four-plus years of upstream ClickHouse improvements in query execution, new functions, and bug fixes, while accumulating its own divergent codebase that nobody outside ByteDance fully understands. FoundationDB as a hard dependency is a significant operational burden — you now run two complex distributed systems just to get one data warehouse. The commercial successor is Volcano Engine's proprietary product, so any investment in ByConity operational knowledge has no carry-over to a viable open-source path.