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Prerequisites
- Access to a ClickHouse instance with the necessary permissions to export data.
- A Google Cloud account with billing enabled.
- Access to Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery.
- The gcloud CLI installed and configured on your local machine.
- The clickhouse-client installed on your local machine or on the server where ClickHouse is running.
- Identify the data you want to export from ClickHouse. Make sure you have the necessary permissions to access the data.
- Use the clickhouse-client to export the data to a CSV or TSV file. For large datasets, consider compressing the file using gzip to save space and reduce upload time.
Example command to export a table to a TSV file:
clickhouse-client --query="SELECT * FROM database.table FORMAT TSV" > data.tsv
If you want to compress the data:
clickhouse-client --query="SELECT * FROM database.table FORMAT TSV" | gzip > data.tsv.gz
- Create a new bucket in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) or use an existing one to store the exported data file.
gsutil mb gs://your-bucket-name
- Upload the data file to the GCS bucket.
gsutil cp data.tsv.gz gs://your-bucket-name/path/to/data/
- If your data is compressed, BigQuery can handle the gzip compression automatically during the load job.
- Define the schema for your BigQuery table. You can either manually define the schema or let BigQuery attempt to auto-detect it during the import. For complex datasets, it’s generally better to define the schema explicitly.
- Create a new dataset in BigQuery.
bq mk your_dataset_name
- If you’ve defined a schema, create a table with that schema in the dataset.
bq mk --table your_dataset_name.your_table_name path/to/schema.json
- Load the data from the GCS bucket into the BigQuery table. You can use the bq command-line tool for this.
bq load --source_format=CSV --autodetect your_dataset_name.your_table_name gs://your-bucket-name/path/to/data/data.tsv.gz
If you have a schema file:
bq load --source_format=CSV your_dataset_name.your_table_name gs://your-bucket-name/path/to/data/data.tsv.gz path/to/schema.json
- Monitor the load job to ensure it completes successfully.
Once the load job is complete, run a query against the table to verify that the data has been imported correctly.
bq query --use_legacy_sql=false 'SELECT * FROM your_dataset_name.your_table_name LIMIT 10'
- After verifying the data, you may want to clean up by removing the exported data file from the GCS bucket to avoid storage costs.
gsutil rm gs://your-bucket-name/path/to/data/data.tsv.gz
- If you created a new dataset and table specifically for this import and no longer need them, you can remove those as well.
bq rm -r -f your_dataset_name
Notes:
- This guide assumes that you are familiar with the command-line tools for ClickHouse, Google Cloud Storage, and BigQuery (clickhouse-client, gsutil, and bq, respectively).
- Always ensure that your data is backed up and securely handled throughout this process.
- For large datasets, consider using batch operations and monitoring to manage the data transfer efficiently.
- You may need to adjust the field delimiter and other format options in the bq load command depending on the format of your exported data file.
- If you encounter errors during the BigQuery load job, check the error messages and adjust your schema or data file accordingly.
FAQs
What is ETL?
ETL, an acronym for Extract, Transform, Load, is a vital data integration process. It involves extracting data from diverse sources, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a database, data warehouse or data lake. This process enables meaningful data analysis, enhancing business intelligence.
An open-source database management system for online analytical processing (OLAP), ClickHouse takes the innovative approach of using a column-based database. It is easy to use right out of the box and is touted as being hardware efficient, extremely reliable, linearly scalable, and “blazing fast”—between 100-1,000x faster than traditional databases that write rows of data to the disk—allowing analytical data reports to be generated in real-time.
What is ELT?
ELT, standing for Extract, Load, Transform, is a modern take on the traditional ETL data integration process. In ELT, data is first extracted from various sources, loaded directly into a data warehouse, and then transformed. This approach enhances data processing speed, analytical flexibility and autonomy.
Difference between ETL and ELT?
ETL and ELT are critical data integration strategies with key differences. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) transforms data before loading, ideal for structured data. In contrast, ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) loads data before transformation, perfect for processing large, diverse data sets in modern data warehouses. ELT is becoming the new standard as it offers a lot more flexibility and autonomy to data analysts.
What should you do next?
Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey: