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ClickHouse/metabase-clickhouse-driver
ClickHouse database driver for the Metabase business intelligence front-end
A Clojure plugin that connected ClickHouse to Metabase for SQL querying and BI dashboards. Relevant historical note: as of Metabase 54 (April 2025), this driver was merged into the main Metabase repo and is now bundled — this standalone repo is effectively archived.
The driver covered the hard parts of ClickHouse's type system — Nullable, LowCardinality, Array, and ClickHouse-specific temporal bucketing — that a generic JDBC driver would silently mishandle. Test suite covers data types, introspection, and temporal bucketing separately, which is the right granularity for a dialect driver. Docker Compose setup with both single-node and cluster configurations made local testing against a real ClickHouse instance straightforward. Graduating to a first-party Metabase driver is about as good an outcome as a community driver can have.
The repo is a dead end — all active development moved to the Metabase monorepo. Anyone landing here via a search result and running an older Metabase version is in an unsupported situation with no migration path except 'upgrade Metabase'. The Clojure codebase is opaque if you're not already in the Metabase contributor ecosystem; there's no documentation on the query processor pipeline (`clickhouse_qp.clj`) beyond the code itself. The test fixtures rely on a running ClickHouse instance with pre-loaded datasets, so CI setup is non-trivial for new contributors who might have caught issues before the driver was frozen.