A table of prime numbers, because why not

This one was about a dataset, not a pain. Primes are a famous sequence that needs no explanation in a talk or a benchmark, and ClickHouse already had numbers() for the integers. Computing primes in SQL is an ugly query (mine was a recursive CTE with trial division, which also hit the recursion-depth limit I filed as #90838). I asked for a system.primes table holding the first million primes, with an index column.

The maintainers did better. PR #92776 by nihalzp, “New table function primes and system.primes”, merged on 2026-01-27 and shipped in 26.2. Instead of a stored, bounded table it is virtual like numbers: primes are generated on demand, in ascending order, with no upper limit, plus a primes() table function taking a limit or an offset and a limit. I lost the index column and gained not storing anything. If you need the index, row_number() OVER () over a limited selection gives it back.

On 26.4:

SELECT prime FROM primes(3, 4);                                  -- 7, 11, 13, 17
SELECT prime FROM system.primes WHERE prime > toUInt64(1e15) LIMIT 1;

1000000000000037

My original request is one OFFSET away: SELECT prime FROM primes() LIMIT 1 OFFSET 999999 returns 15485863, the millionth prime.