The latest articles on DEV Community by Alex U (@alexu8007). https://dev.to/alexu8007 https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3929741%2F185a0b92-5b38-423e-a5b4-fb8fdacf7bec.png https://dev.to/alexu8007 en Alex U Wed, 13 May 2026 16:34:42 +0000 https://dev.to/alexu8007/open-sourced-zenithdb-fastest-db-for-agent-traces-in-rust-4ad6 https://dev.to/alexu8007/open-sourced-zenithdb-fastest-db-for-agent-traces-in-rust-4ad6 <p>Hey Guys!</p> <p>I just open-sourced <a href="https://github.com/Polarityinc/zenith" rel="noopener noreferrer">Zenith</a>, a columnar database engine purpose-built for AI agent traces.</p> <h2> why I built it </h2> <p>Got mad with Clickhouse and couldn't find a OSS alternative for traces. tbh Agent traces are weird. they're long, sparse, high-cardinality JSON with bursty ingest, late annotations, and fat text fields. existing backends are built for short structured spans and pay a 10-100x cost on this workload.</p> <p>Built for things ppl acc do with Agent Traces:</p> <ol> <li> <strong>load a full trace tree</strong> (B1): pull every span for a <code>trace_id</code>, e.g., "show me everything that happened in this user's session". 571μs p95 at 1B rows</li> <li> <strong>filter by attribute</strong> (B2): "find spans where <code>model=claude-opus</code> and <code>tokens &gt; 4000</code>". 4.3k μs p95 at 1B rows</li> <li> <strong>full-text search over prompts and outputs</strong> (B3): grep across millions of tool calls, prompts, and completions</li> <li> <strong>JSONPath into nested attributes</strong> (B6): query arbitrary JSON shapes without pre-defining a schema</li> <li> <strong>group by model / tool / user</strong> (B8): cost and token aggregations across a billion spans in 6.8ms</li> </ol> <h2> try it (30 seconds) </h2> <div class="highlight js-code-highlight"> <pre class="highlight shell"><code>curl <span class="nt">-fsSL</span> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Polarityinc/zenith/main/install.sh | sh zen serve <span class="nt">--config</span> examples/zenithdb.dev.toml </code></pre> </div> <h2> links </h2> <ul> <li>repo: <a href="https://github.com/Polarityinc/zenith" rel="noopener noreferrer">github.com/Polarityinc/zenith</a> </li> <li>Benchmarks <a href="https://zenith.polarity.so" rel="noopener noreferrer">Zenith</a> </li> </ul> <p>it's alpha. core engine is feature-complete but on-disk format and wire protocols may shift before 1.0. stars, issues, and PRs all welcome :)</p> database ai rust programming