Does Your Application Need Local Data or Faster Postgres?
ClickHouse, Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026
ClickHouse engineers weigh local data synchronization against a faster NVMe-backed central Postgres for application performance.
In a ClickHouse engineering blog, Lionel Palacin and Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek argue that teams should ask why an application is slow before adding local copies of data.
Local synchronization makes reads fast but adds another data layer to manage, writes still depend on a central Postgres, and AI agents make the working set harder to predict.
Many managed Postgres services, such as Amazon RDS on EBS or Neon with separated storage, keep data on network storage, so reads that miss the cache cross the network and I/O-bound workloads do not speed up with more compute.
The authors propose a fast, central NVMe-backed Postgres with read replicas as a simpler starting point.