ClickHouse Release 24.1

ClickHouse version 24.1 introduces 26 new features, 22 performance optimizations, and 47 bug fixes. The release includes the ability to generate shingles, functions for Punycode, quantile sketches from Datadog, compression control when writing files, speeds up for HTTP Output and parallel replicas and memory optimizations for keeper and merges. Additionally, ClickHouse's popularity is growing due to contributions from the community. The Variant type has been introduced as an experimental feature, allowing users to work with maps more easily. String similarity functions have also been added, including Levenshtein, Damerau Levenshtein, Jaro Similarity, and Jaro Winkler. These algorithms can be used for spell checking, plagiarism detection, and other applications in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics. The vertical algorithm for FINAL with ReplacingMergeTree has been optimized to reduce cache trashing and improve performance.