Introduction
One of the key goals of recent ClickHouse® releases has been improving compatibility with the ANSI SQL standard. While ClickHouse has always offered a rich set of date and time functions, some syntax differences compared to traditional relational databases required developers to modify existing SQL queries during migrations.
A common example was retrieving the current date or timestamp. Earlier versions of ClickHouse relied on function calls such as today() and now(), whereas many popular databases use SQL-standard keywords like CURRENT_DATE and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.
ClickHouse® 26.3 bridges this gap by introducing support for SQL-standard time functions without parentheses. Although this may seem like a small enhancement, it significantly improves portability for applications, BI tools, reporting platforms, and ORMs that generate ANSI SQL.
In this article, we'll explore what's new, how these functions work, and why this seemingly simple feature makes migrating workloads to ClickHouse much easier.
