---
title: "Building Jaeger’s ClickHouse backend: 8.6× compression on 10 million spans"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-jaeger-s-clickhouse-backend-8-6-compression-on-10-million-spans-3dmlhztxi
source_url: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2026/06/23/building-jaegers-clickhouse-backend-8-6x-compression-on-10-million-spans
type: article
source: "CNCF"
published: 2026-06-23T11:02:36.502Z
updated: 2026-06-23T16:21:02.513Z
tags: ["devops", "opentelemetry", "clickhouse"]
reading_time: 8
upvotes: 3
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Building Jaeger’s ClickHouse backend: 8.6× compression on 10 million spans

**[CNCF](https://daily.dev/sources/cncf)** · 8 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Jaeger v2.18.0 introduces ClickHouse as a storage backend for distributed traces. A Jaeger maintainer explains the architectural decisions behind the implementation, including schema design choices for the primary key (sorted by service_name, name, start_time rather than trace_id), typed attribute storage using ClickHouse Nested columns, and materialized views for fast service/operation lookups. Benchmarks on 10 million spans across a single-node deployment show 8.6× compression (reducing ~6 GiB to ~722 MiB), ingestion throughput above 50k spans/sec, trace retrieval averaging ~100ms, and most search queries completing under 50ms. The feature is available in alpha and leverages ClickHouse's columnar OLAP architecture to handle high-throughput append-only writes and fast analytical aggregations without a separate metrics pipeline.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.cncf.io/blog/2026/06/23/building-jaegers-clickhouse-backend-8-6x-compression-on-10-million-spans>

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---

Tags: [#devops](https://daily.dev/tags/devops), [#opentelemetry](https://daily.dev/tags/opentelemetry), [#clickhouse](https://daily.dev/tags/clickhouse)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-jaeger-s-clickhouse-backend-8-6-compression-on-10-million-spans-3dmlhztxi)