Async INSERTs

Async INSERTs is a ClickHouse feature tha enables batching data automatically and transparently on the server-side. We recommend to batch at app/ingestor level because you will have more control and you decouple this responsibility from ClickHouse, but there are use cases where this is not possible and Async inserts come in handy if you have hundreds or thousands of clients doing small inserts.

You can check how they work here: Async inserts

Some insights about Async inserts you should now:

• Async inserts give acknowledgment immediately after the data got inserted into the buffer (wait_for_async_insert = 0) or by default, after the data got written to a part after flushing from buffer (wait_for_async_insert = 1).
• INSERT .. SELECT is NOT async insert. (You can use matView + Null table OR ephemeral columns instead of INPUT function so Async inserts will work)
• Async inserts will do (idempotent) retries.
• Async inserts can do batching, so multiple inserts can be squashed as a single insert (but in that case, retries are not idempotent anymore).
• Important to use wait_for_async_insert = 1 because with any error you will loose data without knowing it. For example your table is read only -> losing data, out of disk space -> losing data, too many parts -> losing data.
• If wait_for_async_insert = 0:
  • Async inserts can loose your data in case of sudden restart (no fsyncs by default).
  • Async inserted data becomes available for selects not immediately after acknowledgment.
  • Async insert is fast sending ACK to clients unblocking them, because they have to wait until ACK is received. If your use case can handle data loss, you can use wait_for_async_insert = 0 it will increase the throughput.
• Async inserts generally have more moving parts there are some background threads monitoring new data to be sent and pushing it out.
• Async inserts require extra monitoring from different system.tables (see system.part_log, system.query_log, system.asynchronous_inserts and system_asynchronous_insert_log).

features / improvements

• Async insert dedup: Support block deduplication for asynchronous inserts. Before this change, async inserts did not support deduplication, because multiple small inserts coexisted in one inserted batch:
  • #38075
  • #43304
• Added system table asynchronous_insert_log. It contains information about asynchronous inserts (including results of queries in fire-and-forget mode. (with wait_for_async_insert=0)) for better introspection #42040
• Support async inserts in clickhouse-client for queries with inlined data (Native protocol):
  • #34267
  • #54098
  • #54381
• Async insert backpressure #4762
• Limit the deduplication overhead when using async_insert_deduplicate #46549
• SYSTEM FLUSH ASYNC INSERTS #49160
• Adjustable asynchronous insert timeouts #58486

bugfixes

• Fixed bug which could lead to deadlock while using asynchronous inserts #43233.
• Fix crash when async inserts with deduplication are used for ReplicatedMergeTree tables using a nondefault merging algorithm #51676
• Async inserts not working with log_comment setting 48430
• Fix misbehaviour with async inserts with deduplication #50663
• Reject Insert if async_insert=1 and deduplicate_blocks_in_dependent_materialized_views=1#60888
• Disable async_insert_use_adaptive_busy_timeout correctly with compatibility settings #61486

observability / introspection

In 22.x versions, it is not possible to relate part_log/query_id column with asynchronous_insert_log/query_id column. We need to use query_log/query_id:

asynchronous_insert_log shows up the query_id and flush_query_id of each async insert. The query_id from asynchronous_insert_log shows up in the system.query_log as type = 'QueryStart' but the same query_id does not show up in the query_id column of the system.part_log. Because the query_id column in the part_log is the identifier of the INSERT query that created a data part, and it seems it is for sync INSERTS but not for async inserts.

So in asynchronous_inserts table you can check the current batch that still has not been flushed. In the asynchronous_insert_log you can find a log of all the flushed async inserts.

This has been improved in ClickHouse 23.7 Flush queries for async inserts (the queries that do the final push of data) are now logged in the system.query_log where they appear as query_kind = 'AsyncInsertFlush' #51160

Versions

• 23.8 is a good version to start using async inserts because of the improvements and bugfixes.
• 24.3 the new adaptative timeout mechanism has been added so clickhouse will throttle the inserts based on the server load.#58486

Metrics

SELECT name
FROM system.columns
WHERE (`table` = 'metric_log') AND ((name ILIKE '%asyncinsert%') OR (name ILIKE '%asynchronousinsert%'))

┌─name─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ProfileEvent_AsyncInsertQuery                    │
│ ProfileEvent_AsyncInsertBytes                    │
│ ProfileEvent_AsyncInsertRows                     │
│ ProfileEvent_AsyncInsertCacheHits                │
│ ProfileEvent_FailedAsyncInsertQuery              │
│ ProfileEvent_DistributedAsyncInsertionFailures   │
│ CurrentMetric_AsynchronousInsertThreads          │
│ CurrentMetric_AsynchronousInsertThreadsActive    │
│ CurrentMetric_AsynchronousInsertThreadsScheduled │
│ CurrentMetric_AsynchronousInsertQueueSize        │
│ CurrentMetric_AsynchronousInsertQueueBytes       │
│ CurrentMetric_PendingAsyncInsert                 │
│ CurrentMetric_AsyncInsertCacheSize               │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

SELECT *
FROM system.metrics
WHERE (metric ILIKE '%asyncinsert%') OR (metric ILIKE '%asynchronousinsert%')

┌─metric─────────────────────────────┬─value─┬─description─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ AsynchronousInsertThreads          │     1 │ Number of threads in the AsynchronousInsert thread pool.                │
│ AsynchronousInsertThreadsActive    │     0 │ Number of threads in the AsynchronousInsert thread pool running a task. │
│ AsynchronousInsertThreadsScheduled │     0 │ Number of queued or active jobs in the AsynchronousInsert thread pool.  │
│ AsynchronousInsertQueueSize        │     1 │ Number of pending tasks in the AsynchronousInsert queue.                │
│ AsynchronousInsertQueueBytes       │   680 │ Number of pending bytes in the AsynchronousInsert queue.                │
│ PendingAsyncInsert                 │     7 │ Number of asynchronous inserts that are waiting for flush.              │
│ AsyncInsertCacheSize               │     0 │ Number of async insert hash id in cache                                 │
└────────────────────────────────────┴───────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘