Case Study: LINE Digital Frontier achieves real-time MySQL analysis without data movement with ClickHouse

How LINE MANGA used ClickHouse to enable real-time analysis without moving a single row

Line Digital Frontier, the company behind LINE MANGA, needed a way to analyze reader behavior, purchases, and revenue in real time across a sprawling MySQL environment. As their platform grew, horizontally and vertically sharded MySQL databases made even simple joins and cross-shard aggregations slow, manual, and difficult to review, while ETL-based analytics were often stale and couldn’t always include sensitive data.

ClickHouse provided the solution by letting Line Digital Frontier query MySQL directly using the MySQL Table Engine and MySQL Database Engine, with MergeTree-based virtual tables to unify sharded data. With ClickHouse, the team could push filters down to MySQL, join data across shards, and run real-time SQL analysis without moving a single row, improving debugging and ad-hoc analysis while keeping MySQL as the system of record.

Line Digital Frontier

Kazuki Matsuda

Line Digital Frontier