Introducing the (blazing fast!) native TCP client for .NET

ClickHouse has introduced an experimental native TCP client in the ClickHouse.Driver .NET package that uses the Native columnar protocol instead of the existing HTTP RowBinary approach, reducing server-side format conversion and enabling bulk, largely zero-copy and low-allocation reads and writes. Designed for .NET 8 and later, it offers column-streaming APIs, POCO mapping, and object-array compatibility tiers, with the strongest performance benefits available through borrowed column blocks and contiguous buffers; reported benchmarks show typical operations running 1.5 to 2 times faster than HTTP, more than 99% lower allocations in some workloads, read speeds of up to 1.1 million rows per second, and concurrent insert speeds up to 877,000 rows per second. The stateful protocol also supports query progress, profiling events, server logs, server-side cancellation, tracing, and session persistence for temporary tables and settings. However, it is not a drop-in HTTP replacement, as it remains subject to API changes and lacks ADO.NET and ORM support, alternative file formats, JWT authentication, binary JSON handling, and some convenient type behavior, while JSON-heavy and object-array workloads see fewer gains. Users can run both clients from the same package, moving analytical or performance-critical paths to TCP while retaining HTTP for ORMs, file formats, authentication, and other unsupported scenarios, with future plans including ADO.NET support and binary JSON.

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