ClickHouse Empowers Real-Time Analytics with 119 New Functions Introduced in 2025

ClickHouse has significantly expanded its analytical toolkit throughout 2025 by introducing 119 new functions designed to streamline complex queries. While major architectural updates often dominate headlines, these functional additions allow users to perform sophisticated calculations directly within the database engine. According to the ClickHouse Engineering Blog, version 25.7 stood out as the most active release of the year, with twenty-five new functions added in that month alone. The database now natively supports advanced financial modeling with the introduction of the financialInternalRateOfReturn function. This change allows analysts to calculate annualized returns on investments without exporting data to external spreadsheet software or custom application code. By moving these calculations into the SQL layer, ClickHouse continues to reduce the latency and complexity typically associated with multi-stage data processing pipelines. Geospatial and search capabilities also received major upgrades through functions like perimeterSpherical and sparseGrams. The former allows for precise distance calculations on the surface of the Earth, while the latter, originally developed by the GitHub team, offers a specialized alternative to traditional n-grams for building search indexes. These tools are particularly valuable for logistics companies and engineering teams who need to manage large-scale spatial or text-based data sets efficiently. Efficiency and usability were central themes throughout the year, as seen in the arrival of argAndMax and toInterval. These functions eliminate the need for repetitive subqueries or manual type conversions, making SQL code more readable and easier to maintain. By returning tuples that include both the maximum value and its associated dimension, ClickHouse provides a more intuitive way to explore data relationships in a single step. Security also took a step forward with the inclusion of the HMAC function in the 25.12 release. This allows developers to verify message integrity and generate cryptographic signatures directly in the database. As organizations look to centralize more of their logic within the data layer, having these security primitives available within the query engine simplifies the development of secure, real-time data applications.