# Alexey Milovidov

> Alexey Milovidov is the original creator, co-founder and chief technology officer of ClickHouse. He began the database as an experiment inside Yandex.Metrica after existing systems could not answer real-time analytical questions at the required scale, guided it into production, persuaded Yandex to release it as open source in 2016, and co-founded an independent company around it in 2021. Based in Amsterdam, he remains a hands-on engineer, prolific technical writer and regular host of ClickHouse release calls.

- **Role:** Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at ClickHouse
- **Organizations:** ClickHouse, Yandex, Yandex.Metrica
- **Education:** Moscow State University
- **Known for:** Created the ClickHouse analytical database from scratch, beginning with experiments inside Yandex.Metrica., Guided ClickHouse into production in 2012 and customer-facing use in 2014., Persuaded Yandex to approve an open-source release and coordinated the June 15, 2016 launch under the Apache 2.0 license.

## Career timeline

- **Early 1990s** — Encountered a BK-0010 home computer through his two older brothers, learned BASIC and began making simple games before age ten.
- **2008** — Joined Yandex and worked on the new web analytics service that launched as Yandex.Metrica.
- **2008-2009** — Built the OLAPServer and Metrage prototypes while searching for faster ways to analyze growing web traffic.
- **2009** — Made the earliest commits in the code history that would become ClickHouse; the database itself then developed from a column-oriented and merge-tree experiment.
- **2012** — Introduced the ClickHouse server and client and deployed the system in production for log storage and SQL queries.
- **2014** — ClickHouse powered user-facing queries in Yandex.Metrica 2.0 and spread to other Yandex teams; CERN was an early external deployment.
- **2016** — Led the preparation and release of ClickHouse as an Apache 2.0 open-source project on June 15.
- **2021** — Co-founded ClickHouse, Inc. with Aaron Katz and Yury Izrailevsky and became CTO after the core team moved from Yandex.
- **2022** — ClickHouse opened European offices in Amsterdam and launched ClickHouse Cloud.
- **2026** — Marked ten years of ClickHouse in open source; the project had grown to more than 2,000 contributors.

## Achievements

- Created the ClickHouse analytical database from scratch, beginning with experiments inside Yandex.Metrica.
- Guided ClickHouse into production in 2012 and customer-facing use in 2014.
- Persuaded Yandex to approve an open-source release and coordinated the June 15, 2016 launch under the Apache 2.0 license.
- Co-founded ClickHouse, Inc. in 2021 with Aaron Katz and Yury Izrailevsky.
- Helped grow ClickHouse into an open-source project with more than 2,000 contributors by its tenth anniversary.
- Continues to contribute code, publish engineering articles and present the database’s monthly community releases.
- Built public ClickHouse demonstrations around GitHub activity, ADS-B aircraft data, global weather data and a live playground for 110 database systems.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — Published a ClickHouse playground that lets users run queries against 110 database systems.
- **2026-07** — Co-authored an article on the ClickHouse documentation relaunch.
- **2026-06** — Published a detailed retrospective marking ten years since ClickHouse was released as open source.
- **2026-06** — Discussed introducing Rust into ClickHouse’s long-running C++ codebase on the Rust in Production podcast.
- **2026-04** — Published an account of how the ClickHouse engineering team uses coding agents in its development workflow.

## Links

- Website: https://clickhouse.com/authors/alexey-milovidov
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexey-milovidov-clickhouse
- GitHub: https://github.com/alexey-milovidov
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3K1I5_Biac

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/alexey-milovidov
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26