clickhouse-local is similar to duckdb, you don't need a clickhouse-server running in order to use clickhouse-local. You just need to download the clickhouse binary and start using it.

  clickhouse local
  ClickHouse local version 25.4.1.1143 (official build).

  :)

There are few benefits of using clickhouse-local since ClickHouse can just do lot more than DuckDB. One such example is handling compressed files. ClickHouse can handle compressed files with formats ranging from zstd, lz4, snappy, gz, xz, bz2, zip, tar, 7zip.

  clickhouse local --query "SELECT count() FROM file('top-1m-2018-01-10.csv.zip :: *.csv')"
  1000000

Also clickhouse-local is much more efficient in handling big csv files[0]

[0]: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/clickhouse-local-vs-duckdb

Wanted to try it.

Debian package is of poor quality: not even sure if clickhouse local is included in there, I believe so but there is no manpage, no doc at all, and no `clickhouse-server -h`.

Went to the official page looking for a tarball to download, found only the `curl|sh` joke.

Went to github looking for tagged tarballs, couldn't find any. Looked for INSTALL.md, couldn't find any.

Will try harder later, have to weep my tears for now.

ClickHouse is a single binary. It can be invoked as clickhouse-server, clickhouse-client, and clickhouse-local. The help is available as `clickhouse-local --help`. clickhouse-local also has a shorthand alias, `ch`.

This binary is packaged inside .deb, .rpm, and .tgz, and it is also available for direct download. The curl|sh script selects the platform (x86_64, aarch64 x Linux, Mac, FreeBSD) and downloads the appropriate binary.

> Debian package is of poor quality

Can you elaborate more please? I would love if you can say what all can be improved to make debian package up to standards.

Thank you for your interest.

My comment was really about the state of documentation ("there is no manpage, no doc at all, and no `clickhouse-server -h`"). More specifically:

  % dpkg -S clickhouse-server | grep bin
  clickhouse-server: /usr/sbin/clickhouse-server
  % man clickhouse-server
  No manual entry for clickhouse-server
  % man clickhouse       
  No manual entry for clickhouse
  % /usr/sbin/clickhouse-server --help
  Unknown option specified: help
  % /usr/sbin/clickhouse-server -h    
  Unknown option specified: h
  % ls -l /usr/share/doc/clickhouse-server
  total 60
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root   235 Dec  5  2022 changelog.Debian.amd64.gz
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1437 Dec  5  2022 changelog.Debian.gz
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33174 Dec 20  2018 changelog.gz
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15057 Oct 29  2022 copyright