Holistics Joins House Mates — ClickHouse’s New Partner Ecosystem

Holistics has been selected for the first cohort of House Mates, ClickHouse's formal partner ecosystem. House Mates is ClickHouse's way of ensuring their customers get the best possible experience across the tools they pair with ClickHouse. The program gives partners like Holistics a structured pathway — through three tiers: Ignite, Accelerate, and Prime — to deepen their ClickHouse integration, access technical support and sandbox environments, and collaborate with ClickHouse's field team on joint customer success. The goal is simple: when a ClickHouse customer picks a partner tool, that tool should work exceptionally well with ClickHouse.

The formal program is new, the relationship itself isn't: Holistics has been working with ClickHouse-based teams for years, and the ClickHouse team has been recommending us to their customers for just as long. House Mates puts a formal structure around a relationship that's already been producing results.

Years of working with ClickHouse teams

Holistics was one of the first BI platforms to build a native ClickHouse connector, and we've been refining it across multiple ClickHouse versions since. That early investment created a compounding effect: ClickHouse users found us, adopted us, and the ClickHouse team started recommending us alongside tools like Omni and Grafana during vendor evaluations.

Over time, this turned into a steady stream of ClickHouse-sourced customers across different industries and regions. Pharmacy networks in Australia. E-commerce platforms in Europe. Insurance companies in Latin America. The industries varied, but the technical setup converged: ClickHouse as the analytical warehouse, Holistics as the BI and reporting layer on top.

Why Holistics is the right BI tool for ClickHouse

ClickHouse users are a specific kind of team. They chose a columnar database for its raw query speed and cost efficiency. They tend to prefer infrastructure they control, workflows defined in code, and tools that stay out of their way. The BI layer they pair with ClickHouse needs to match that mindset.

Here's why Holistics fits.

Native ClickHouse connectivity — no ODBC, no drivers. Holistics connects over HTTP/HTTPS directly. You enter your host, port, credentials, toggle SSL for ClickHouse Cloud, and you're querying in minutes. Most BI tools either skip ClickHouse support entirely or require ODBC workarounds that add instability and configuration overhead. ClickHouse users treat native connectivity as a hard filter during evaluation. If a tool needs ODBC, it doesn't make the shortlist.

The strongest semantic layer in the category. Holistics uses AML (Analytics Modeling Language) — a code-first semantic layer where data models, relationships, metrics, and business logic are defined as version-controlled code. If you've worked with dbt or LookML, the structure feels familiar: you define once, reuse everywhere, and keep everything in Git.

But AML goes further than most modeling languages. It supports multi-model relationships, metric-level definitions with dimension context, and row-level security baked into the model — so access rules follow the data wherever it appears. For ClickHouse teams running complex analytical workloads across multiple fact tables and shared dimensions, this matters. The semantic layer is what keeps things maintainable when you're serving dozens of dashboards to hundreds of users.

One customer's data lead connected ClickHouse to Holistics, explored the schema, and started building models within five minutes. He noted that AML felt natural coming from a dbt background — and praised the platform's polish: "One of the good things about Holistics is that it's been around for a while, so you've probably had time to fine-tune a lot of things that people complain about — like 'I can't find this' or 'put this somewhere else.' So that's very good."

AI-powered analytics built on the semantic layer. Holistics is an AI analytics platform — and the semantic layer is what makes the AI actually work. Because AML captures the business logic, metric definitions, and relationships in a structured, machine-readable format, Holistics' AI features can generate accurate queries, suggest relevant metrics, and build visualizations that respect the data model. AI without a semantic layer hallucinates. AI on top of a well-defined semantic layer produces answers you can trust.

Caching that complements ClickHouse's speed. ClickHouse handles analytical queries fast. Holistics adds a smart cache layer on top, so repeated dashboard loads avoid re-executing the same queries. When your dashboards serve hundreds of external users — franchise owners, merchants, clients, this keeps both query costs and latency predictable at scale.

Embedded analytics as a first-class capability. Almost every ClickHouse customer we've worked with uses Holistics for external-facing analytics: dashboards embedded in their own product, shared via password-protected links, or delivered as scheduled reports. They're buying BI to serve their customers.

Holistics handles this through shareable links with row-level security, embeddable iframes, white-labeling, and scheduled delivery — with pricing models (query-run and worker-based) that scale with usage rather than per-seat, so serving 300 franchise owners or 700 merchants doesn't break the budget.

SQL escape hatch when you need it. ClickHouse users are SQL-literate. They want a modeling layer for structure and reuse, but they also want the ability to write raw SQL for complex edge cases — unusual date logic, multi-fact joins, custom aggregations. Holistics supports both: AML for the semantic layer, pure SQL query models when you need full control.

Getting started

If you're running ClickHouse and want to try Holistics, the setup is short:

1. Create a read-only ClickHouse user with SELECT on your target tables and system.* for schema detection.
2. Add a ClickHouse data source in Holistics — host, port (8443 for Cloud, 8123 for self-hosted), database, and credentials.
3. Enable SSL if you're on ClickHouse Cloud.
4. Test and save.

For instances behind a firewall or inside a VPC, Holistics supports both IP allowlisting and reverse SSH tunnels — so you can connect without exposing your database publicly.

We've published a full connection guide covering prerequisites, permissions, network configuration, and known limitations. And if your use case is embedded or external analytics on ClickHouse — that's the scenario we know best in this ecosystem, and the one where we can help you move fastest.

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Holistics is an AI analytics platform with a code-based semantic layer. ClickHouse is a fast, open-source columnar database. Together, they give data teams a governed, high-performance stack from warehouse to dashboard.