--- collection: data-engineering collection_name: Data & Analytics Engineering week_start: 2026-09-21 title: ClickHouse's 26.9 feature drop anchors a week of query-engine refinements release_count: 15 generated: 2026-09-28 canonical: https://releases.sh/collections/data-engineering/digest/2026-09-21 --- # ClickHouse's 26.9 feature drop anchors a week of query-engine refinements ClickHouse shipped the 26.9 stable line with conditional LIMIT boundaries, disk spilling for DISTINCT, and time-limited tokens, while dbt-core brought Unity Catalog reads to Lake Compute and Dagster tightened project-loading diagnostics. ### ClickHouse 26.9 lands, and the maintenance trains follow The week's headline is ClickHouse 26.9, which [introduced conditional LIMIT boundaries, incremental refreshes for append-only materialized views, disk spilling for DISTINCT, time-limited tokens, and faster min/max/count queries](https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-release-26-09). Those are the kinds of changes that touch actual query plans: spilling DISTINCT keeps large aggregations from dying on memory limits, append-only materialized views can now refresh incrementally instead of rebuilding, and time-limited tokens give teams a way to hand out short-lived credentials without a separate auth layer. With the new line cut, the rest of the product's week was the usual multi-branch maintenance rhythm. The stable channel [moved through its early 26.9 patches](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.1.1629-stable) and then [a second round of 26.9 fixes](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.2.8-stable), [a third](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.3.38-stable) and [a fourth](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.4.3-stable), while the LTS branches got parallel attention: [the 26.8 LTS line picked up its first September patch](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.10.6-lts), followed by [more 26.8 LTS fixes](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.11.7-lts), [a further 26.8 maintenance cut](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.12.53-lts) and [another](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.13.2-lts). Older supported lines weren't forgotten — [the 26.7 stable branch was patched](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.7.14.3-stable) and [again later in the week](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.7.15.52-stable), and [26.3 LTS received its own fix](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.3.34.136-lts). If you run ClickHouse in production, the practical takeaway is that 26.9 is now the branch to evaluate and the 26.8 LTS is where the conservative upgrades landed. ### Tinybird moves scheduled Copy Pipes off workspace compute Tinybird's change this week is small in surface area but meaningful for anyone pushing data between datasources on a schedule: paid workspaces can now [run scheduled Copy Pipes on isolated on-demand compute](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/changelog/2026-09-25-september-week-four) by adding a single flag to the Copy node. Scheduled executions stop competing with workspace compute, which matters when a recurring copy job is heavy enough to skew the latency of interactive queries. Manual runs still need the on-demand flag passed explicitly on the CLI. ### dbt-core brings Unity Catalog reads to Lake Compute The dev line of dbt-core continues to fill out Lake Compute, this time with [Unity Catalog reads against AWS Databricks using PAT or OAuth M2M credentials](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt/releases/tag/v2.0.0-dev.41-test-pypi), plus declaration-aware validation and parity for `dbt debug` attach. The same development build also [fixed `modules.re` functions silently dropping keyword arguments](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt/releases/tag/v2.0.0-dev.41-test-pypi) such as flags, maxsplit, and count, and stopped Databricks tag diffs from reporting unchanged columns and keys. Note the migration caveat: existing local Unity attach options under `config.lakecompute` have to move to `config.duckdb`, and Unity access is read-only — model writes aren't supported. ### Dagster sharpens its error messages Dagster's week was mostly quality-of-life: projects whose root module isn't importable now [raise an error explaining that the package is probably not installed](https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.24) rather than a bare `ModuleNotFoundError`, and the ECS agent [gained cross-account service discovery](https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.24) so it can register code server tasks in a Cloud Map namespace living in a different AWS account, reconciling on a configurable interval. ## Releases covered ### ClickHouse - [ClickHouse release 26.9](https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-release-26-09) - [Release v26.9.1.1629-stable](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.1.1629-stable) - [Release v26.9.2.8-stable](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.2.8-stable) - [Release v26.9.3.38-stable](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.3.38-stable) - [Release v26.9.4.3-stable](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.9.4.3-stable) - [Release v26.8.10.6-lts](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.10.6-lts) - [Release v26.8.11.7-lts](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.11.7-lts) - [Release v26.8.12.53-lts](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.12.53-lts) - [Release v26.8.13.2-lts](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.8.13.2-lts) - [Release v26.7.14.3-stable](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.7.14.3-stable) - [Release v26.7.15.52-stable](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.7.15.52-stable) - [Release v26.3.34.136-lts](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/releases/tag/v26.3.34.136-lts) ### Dagster - [1.13.24 (core) / 0.29.24 (libraries)](https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.24) ### dbt Labs - [dbt-core 2.0.0-dev.41 adds Unity Catalog reads on Lake Compute](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt/releases/tag/v2.0.0-dev.41-test-pypi) ### Tinybird - [Run scheduled Copy Pipes on on-demand compute](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/changelog/2026-09-25-september-week-four)