Andy Pavlo announced on the ClickHouse blog that he is joining the company to create and lead a new research team called ClickHouse Labs. According to the post, Pavlo began his career as a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and has spent his career studying the internals of modern database management systems. He said he has followed ClickHouse’s development since it was first released as open-source software in June 2016, noting that its early use of C++ and SIMD‑based vectorized query execution stood out among open‑source analytical DBMSs at the time.
Pavlo explained that the motivation for forming ClickHouse Labs came from his long‑standing interest in the system and an invitation from the ClickHouse co‑founders. He described the new group as a best‑in‑class industry research organization that will work closely with ClickHouse engineers, customers, collaborators, and industry partners rather than operating in isolation. The labs will also cooperate with ClickHouse’s PostgreSQL team to support the managed service offering, noting that while PostgreSQL and ClickHouse serve different workloads, their combination provides a foundation for studying both transactional and analytical database problems.
The stated objective of ClickHouse Labs is to conduct research with scientific value and then help turn the most promising ideas into technology that benefits users. Pavlo said he hopes to achieve impact comparable to that of pioneering industry research organizations such as IBM Research and Microsoft Research, which have advanced fundamental computer science, influenced commercial products, and trained generations of researchers.
Looking ahead, Pavlo indicated that one of his immediate priorities will be to help validate and push into production a backlog of ideas and optimizations that the ClickHouse engineering team has explored but not yet fully validated. He also said the labs will investigate how DBMSs like ClickHouse and PostgreSQL can better support emerging AI and agentic technologies, examining both how a DBMS should be designed to aid agents and how agents might improve and automate DBMS development.
The announcement noted that ClickHouse engineers have already published detailed technical material about the system, including a 2024 VLDB paper describing its core architecture, which Pavlo assigns to his students at Carnegie Mellon. He emphasized that his background in studying how database systems are built and training the people who build them aligns with the mission of the new labs.