Andy Pavlo has joined ClickHouse to establish and lead a new research team called ClickHouse Labs. He began his academic career as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013, focusing on the science of modern DBMS internals and tracking every new system in industry and academia. Pavlo first heard of ClickHouse when it was announced as open‑source in 2016. He was skeptical at first, but the system’s vectorized query execution and SIMD support—features then limited to a few closed‑source analytics engines—proved its seriousness. Since then, he has followed ClickHouse’s development closely and even wore a ClickHouse shirt in his 2020 remote lectures.

ClickHouse Labs intends to be a best‑in‑class industry research organization that collaborates tightly with ClickHouse engineers, customers, and partners. The team will also work with ClickHouse’s PostgreSQL group to strengthen its managed service, tackling both transactional and analytical workloads. Pavlo’s goal is to conduct research of scientific value and translate the best ideas into production technology, mirroring the impact of IBM Research and Microsoft Research.

Immediate priorities include accelerating the validation of engineering ideas and exploring how DBMSs like ClickHouse and PostgreSQL fit into emerging AI and agentic technologies. Pavlo believes ClickHouse’s solid relational model positions it to evolve with data‑intensive workloads and to train the next generation of database researchers.