# What is the backend database system that is used for open targets data?

**URL:** <https://community.opentargets.org/t/what-is-the-backend-database-system-that-is-used-for-open-targets-data/412>\
**Category:** Platform Infrastructure\
**Created:** [29 November 2021 01:44 UTC](https://community.opentargets.org/t/what-is-the-backend-database-system-that-is-used-for-open-targets-data/412 "2021-11-29T01:44:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![wenliang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b9bd4f/32.png) [@wenliang](https://community.opentargets.org/u/wenliang)\
**Post date:** [29 November 2021 01:44 UTC](https://community.opentargets.org/t/what-is-the-backend-database-system-that-is-used-for-open-targets-data/412/1 "2021-11-29T01:44:23Z")

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Hello, Open Target Community,

I am pretty new to Open Targets. I am fascinated by how Open Targets can host such big data with increasing size and varieties and also providing fast queries. I am very interested in know more about the platform infrastructure. I find some information here, [Platform infrastructure - Open Targets Platform Documentation](https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/infrastructure), but it looks somewhat abstract to me. Are the backend a mixed implementation of Elasticsearch and Clickhouse? And how the GraphQL and Google BigQuery interact with the backend? I have some familiarity with Elasticsearch, but no Clickhouse. Is there any good introductory tutorial on more details on how the system works and infrastructure setup? Thanks a lot!

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**Author:** ![ahercules](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f4b2a3/32.png) [@ahercules](https://community.opentargets.org/u/ahercules)\
**Post date:** [9 December 2021 16:45 UTC](https://community.opentargets.org/t/what-is-the-backend-database-system-that-is-used-for-open-targets-data/412/2 "2021-12-09T16:45:41Z")

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Hello @wenliang! 👋

Welcome to the Open Targets Community! 🎉

My apologies for the delay in responding to your post.

Yes, we use both ElasticSearch and ClickHouse to power the Open Targets Platform. ElasticSearch contains data related to our main entities – targets, diseases/phenotypes, and drugs – along with our target-disease evidence. ClickHouse contains our target-disease associations data and this allows us to explore opportunities to provide on-the-fly scoring for target-disease associations.

[Our GraphQL API](https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/data-access/graphql-api) exposes various endpoints that are used by [our front-end web interface](https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/web-interface).

We also host our data in [Google BigQuery](https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/data-access/google-bigquery) to support users that want to use SQL to answer more complex and systematic queries.

You can learn more about the technical aspects of the Platform in [our infrastructure documentation](https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/infrastructure) which contains relevant links to [our GitHub repositories](https://github.com/opentargets).

Feel free to comment below if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

~ Andrew 🙂