ClickHouse 26.7 ships 61 new features, 112 performance optimizations, and 329 bug fixes. Key highlights include a 313× speedup for GROUP BY ... ORDER BY ... LIMIT queries via a fused streaming pipeline with early termination, three JOIN improvements (build-side granule pruning for 6.2× speedup, packed row references for 12–21% faster hash joins, and a new DPsub join-ordering algorithm), four vector search enhancements (Int8 QBit quantization, strided dimension storage, randomized Hadamard rotations, and quantization codecs for two-stage search), position-aware phrase search for 40× faster text queries, the new EXPLAIN ANALYZE command for measuring actual query execution, unified URL access across S3/GCS/Azure/HDFS, DateTime64 extended to years 0–9999, a new groupFormat aggregate function, and experimental drivers for writing UDFs directly in SQL.
