The UK property prices dataset

Learn how to use projections to improve the performance of queries that you run frequently using the UK property dataset, which contains data about prices paid for real-estate property in England and Wales

This data contains prices paid for real-estate property in England and Wales. The data is available since 1995, and the size of the dataset in uncompressed form is about 4 GiB (which will only take about 278 MiB in ClickHouse).

• Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/price-paid-data-downloads
• Description of the fields: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/about-the-price-paid-data
• Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2021. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Create the table

CREATE DATABASE uk;

CREATE TABLE uk.uk_price_paid
(
    price UInt32,
    date Date,
    postcode1 LowCardinality(String),
    postcode2 LowCardinality(String),
    type Enum8('terraced' = 1, 'semi-detached' = 2, 'detached' = 3, 'flat' = 4, 'other' = 0),
    is_new UInt8,
    duration Enum8('freehold' = 1, 'leasehold' = 2, 'unknown' = 0),
    addr1 String,
    addr2 String,
    street LowCardinality(String),
    locality LowCardinality(String),
    town LowCardinality(String),
    district LowCardinality(String),
    county LowCardinality(String)
)
ENGINE = MergeTree
ORDER BY (postcode1, postcode2, addr1, addr2);

Preprocess and insert the data

We will use the url function to stream the data into ClickHouse. We need to preprocess some of the incoming data first, which includes:

• splitting the postcode to two different columns - postcode1 and postcode2, which is better for storage and queries
• converting the time field to date as it only contains 00:00 time
• ignoring the UUid field because we don’t need it for analysis
• transforming type and duration to more readable Enum fields using the transform function
• transforming the is_new field from a single-character string (Y/N) to a UInt8 field with 0 or 1
• drop the last two columns since they all have the same value (which is 0)

The url function streams the data from the web server into your ClickHouse table. The following command inserts 5 million rows into the uk_price_paid table:

INSERT INTO uk.uk_price_paid
SELECT
    toUInt32(price_string) AS price,
    parseDateTimeBestEffortUS(time) AS date,
    splitByChar(' ', postcode)[1] AS postcode1,
    splitByChar(' ', postcode)[2] AS postcode2,
    transform(a, ['T', 'S', 'D', 'F', 'O'], ['terraced', 'semi-detached', 'detached', 'flat', 'other']) AS type,
    b = 'Y' AS is_new,
    transform(c, ['F', 'L', 'U'], ['freehold', 'leasehold', 'unknown']) AS duration,
    addr1,
    addr2,
    street,
    locality,
    town,
    district,
    county
FROM url(
    'http://prod1.publicdata.landregistry.gov.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/pp-complete.csv',
    'CSV',
    'uuid_string String,
    price_string String,
    time String,
    postcode String,
    a String,
    b String,
    c String,
    addr1 String,
    addr2 String,
    street String,
    locality String,
    town String,
    district String,
    county String,
    d String,
    e String'
) SETTINGS max_http_get_redirects=10;

Wait for the data to insert - it will take a minute or two depending on the network speed.

Validate the data

Let’s verify it worked by seeing how many rows were inserted:

At the time this query was run, the dataset had 27,450,499 rows. Let’s see what the storage size is of the table in ClickHouse:

Notice the size of the table is just 221.43 MiB!

Run some queries

Let’s run some queries to analyze the data:

Query 1. Average price per year

Query 2. average price per year in London

Something happened to home prices in 2020! But that is probably not a surprise…

Query 3. The most expensive neighborhoods

Speeding up queries with projections

We can speed up these queries with projections. See “Projections” for examples with this dataset.

Test it in the playground

The dataset is also available in the Online Playground.