Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs
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Professor Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to lead a new research group, ClickHouse Labs.
Andy Pavlo, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, is joining ClickHouse to establish and lead ClickHouse Labs, a new industry research organization focused on databases. The lab will work closely with ClickHouse engineers, customers, and partners to develop and disseminate new ideas. Pavlo aims to achieve impact similar to IBM Research and Microsoft Research. Immediate priorities include validating ideas from the engineering backlog. The lab will also investigate how databases like ClickHouse and PostgreSQL fit into emerging AI and agentic technologies.
Pavlo has followed ClickHouse since its 2016 open-source announcement and has assigned its technical materials to his students.
What commenters are saying
Commenters broadly congratulated Pavlo, with many expressing admiration for his open-source CMU database lecture series. One commenter credited the course with helping them interview for a database team, though another questioned the appropriateness of cold-messaging a hiring manager after completing a MOOC.
A debate emerged about the nature of database research. Some argued databases are a deep tech field with hard unsolved problems, while others countered that databases are mature commercial products and not comparable to fields like nuclear fusion. Several commenters pointed to other database companies with research labs, including MongoDB and Oracle.