How to Describe a Table in ClickHouse
Last updated July 25, 2026 · By the SaturnSQL team
DESCRIBE TABLE shows columns, types, and default expressions. SHOW CREATE TABLE returns the full DDL including the engine, ORDER BY, PARTITION BY, and TTL clauses, which DESCRIBE does not show.
DESCRIBE TABLE events;Full definition
SHOW CREATE TABLE events;For programmatic access, system.columns has the same information as DESCRIBE plus compression and size statistics per column.
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