What's the difference between Timescale's license ("free to everyone except cloud providers") and GPLv3?
Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
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Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#42Can someone please summarize what it does because I couldn't figure out from website? It says its "on Postgres", is it a flavor of PG? or it sits on top of multiple PG instances.
How's this:
TimescaleDB is a distributed time-series database that is packaged as a Postgres extension (a "mega-extension" to quote someone else on this thread).
TimescaleDB:
* Scales to over 10 million of metrics per second [0]
* Supports native compression, using delta-delta, Gorilla, Simple-8B RLE, and other best-in-class compression algorithms (achieving a median 94% compression based on user data) [1]
* Offers native time-series capabilities, such as data retention policies, continuous aggregate views, real-time aggregates, downsampling, data gap-filling, and interpolation
* Handles high cardinality [2]
* Outperforms other non-relational databases including InfluxDB [3], Mongo [4], Cassandra [5] for time-series data
With TimescaleDB you also get all of the goodness that is built into Postgres: full SQL, a variety of data types (numerics, text, arrays, JSON, booleans), ACID semantics, and operationally mature capabilities including high-availability, streaming backups, upgrades over time, roles and permissions, and security.
[0] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-a-distributed-time-...
[1] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compressio...
[2] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/what-is-high-cardinality-how...
[3] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-influxdb-for-...
[4] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-to-store-time-series-dat...
[5] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/time-series-data-cassandra-v...
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Timescale CEO and post author) You are spot on. Before the Timescale License, we were left with a tough decision: do we open-source a feature so that everyone can have it for free OR do we close a feature so that the mega-clouds don't have access to it? We didn't like either of those options, which is why we created the Timescale License, which allows us to offer capabilities for free (and make the source code avail…
I'm a huge fan of Splunk but always want to keep my eye open for alternatives. My use case is mostly security analytics against event content and patterns, and for that the Splunk Processing Language is very well suited. That said I find it's fairly tedious to do a lot of time-series analysis and pattern discovery/anomaly detction across rich event models (think aws cloudtrail events). Anything TimescaleDB can help w…
What makes it tedious?
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Timescale CEO and post author) You are spot on. Before the Timescale License, we were left with a tough decision: do we open-source a feature so that everyone can have it for free OR do we close a feature so that the mega-clouds don't have access to it? We didn't like either of those options, which is why we created the Timescale License, which allows us to offer capabilities for free (and make the source code avail…
Can this license be used to, say, create a Datadog-like SaaS powered by TimescaledDB?
It depends on the amount of access to TimescaleDB the services provides.
If you're really curious, I'd be happy to chat: ajay (at) timescale.com
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like open source to me, I bet they're just being really conservative about saying "open source" because there's been so much backlash at MongoDB/Cockroach/etc for similar restrictions. It's restricted OSS because AWS takes things, runs them, and eats up all the potential revenue.
> That sounds like open source to me, I bet they're just being really conservative about saying "open source" because people there's been so much backlash at MongoDB/Cockroach/etc for similar restrictions. Open Source has a very defined meaning. Please read up on the history of open source and source available licenses before saying it is all the same. We've been defending it against a number of attacks and we will p…
> Please read up on the history of open source
Not this patronizing bullshit again.
The term "open source" was marketing to take advantage of Netscape releasing their source code. Since since, everyone seems keen on trying to usurp its definition for whatever personal perspective they have that week.
To the rest of the community outside of the OSI and FSF (which is 99%+ of the software community), this is a perfectly acceptable example of "open source" that we're all that much richer for having.
The Timescale license checks almost all the boxes of the OSI definition (and I'm not certain how denying cloud providers specifically violates any of the language):
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#46I work with a lot of time series tables in Postgres, albeit not at the scale that this targets. (some millions of rows, distributed sparsely over time, on which the median insert/update size is 200k rows).
I like concepts behind TimescaleDB, and understand the value it's adding to vanilla Postgres. We have our own implementation at my company and it's quite good for our purposes, but it would certainly struggle at TDB's targeted scale.
As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong, this is my impression from the marketing page), TimescaleDB is "more than an Extension" to Postgres, because it rewrites some of the Postgres internals (query parser, etc)?
If this is true, I'm curious, was it not possible to package the same results into an extension? What was the decision process like? Could the concept not be upstreamed into Postgres? I'm relatively ignorant of this side of the community, so please forgive me if this question is naive.
Finally, if it is "more than an extension", does this imply that TimescaleDB is a fork of Postgres, with all the risks to adoption that entails?
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#47> All of these capabilities are being released under the Timescale License, our source-available license that permits broad usage, except for where organizations are providing TimescaleDB-as-a-service.
Maybe someone can give clarification on this, but the line between using TimescaleDB to build a product and providing TimescaleDB-as-a-service seems incredibly blurry. If I have a product that in some way let's you query time series data, and that product is powered by a TimescaleDB, would that count as providing TimescaleDB-as-a-service?
I used to work for Heap which is an analytics tool. In a way you can view Heap as just a wrapper around Postgres. We stored event data in Postgres and provided a UI that allowed you to express queries (e.g. count the number of logins over the past month). We would take the query in the UI, compile it into a SQL query, and run the SQL against Postgres. If Heap was powered by TimescaleDB, would that violate the Timescale License? In fact, you could technically view any dashboarding product that queries TimescaleDB as providing "TimescaleDB-as-a-service".
I looked at the actual license[0] to see what it says, and it seems really unclear. The license gives you permission to use TimescaleDB to develop "Value Added Products or Services" which it defines as a product that uses TimescaleDB as part of a larger offering. One of the requirements for a product or service to be considered "Value Added" is:
> (ii) such value-added products or services add substantial value of a different nature to the time-series database storage and operations afforded by the Timescale Software and are the key functions upon which such products or services are offered and marketed
This seems incredibly vague. What exactly does "substantial value of a different nature" mean? In the end, tons of products are just wrappers around DBs. If products like Heap or Datadog were to be backed by TimescaleDB, would they add "substantial value of a different nature" on top of it? In the end, Heap and Datadog are products designed for querying time series data. I could definitely make a case that they don't provide value of a different nature from TimescaleDB. This vagueness seems like a huge risk and without further clarification, makes me want to stay far away from TimescaleDB.
[0] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/master/tsl/LIC...
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#48I think this is a good move. But from an enforcement perspective, how realistic is it to prevent someone like Amazon from offering a clone service (at least for backend components) and claiming they wrote it from scratch? Is there any way to force them to reveal the source for a particular service?
I mean.. you think any major provider like Amazon is going to just blatantly rip it off and sell it saying "We created this!"
That's just not going to happen.
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#49I understand that the Timescale license can't be utilized by cloud providers, but what about others who need a timeseries database for their SaaS offering? Is this permitted as long as you aren't marketing a hosted TimescaleDB solution? Edit: wording
That would be permitted, as long as the service isn't just a "TimescaleDB-as-a-service." [0]
For example, if the service allowed users to only make DML changes (access / modify data) then it is ok, but DDL changes (creating / modifying database schemas) is not permitted.
In fact, we already have 100s of SaaS companies using TimescaleDB as part of their offering.
Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
#50Are there any tools to migrate from elasticsearch to timescale ? We are considering a switch from our es and are evaluating options. Timeseries is also one of the contenders. We are not looking for text search just some nested queries on a timeseries data.