I don't think it's accurate to say the ClickHouse use case is narrow. ClickHouse is extremely good at loading and querying events arriving in near-real time from event streams like Kafka. It can also load very efficiently from data lakes. Like Druid it can offer low latency response even as the data set size scales into trillions of rows.
ClickHouse is used for everything from log management to managing CDN delivery to real-time marketing and many other applications. It's gone far beyond the web analytics use case for which it was originally developed at Yandex.
Can you explain more how it’s used for real time marketing and other things? Ive only used it for OLAP which although it has a lot of different things is still more or less the same thing abstractly. Would love to hear about these other uses.
For example, you can use ClickHouse queries to dynamically change the shape of pages based on user behavior across multiple sites (aka retargeting). You can can also use ClickHouse to manage CDN downloads in real time. Here are a couple of talks that illustrate both use cases.
We still call this OLAP but it's quite different from traditional uses. In particular the core data come event streams.
ClickHouse is used for everything from log management to managing CDN delivery to real-time marketing and many other applications. It's gone far beyond the web analytics use case for which it was originally developed at Yandex.
Edit: clarification