Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free • Hacker News Board

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#61

Post by pritambaral » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

mrkurt wrote: post #10

speedgoose wrote: post #5

>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. So it's not open-source because AWS hasn't been nice with ElasticSearch and they don't want to be in the same situation?

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.

The Timescale License does not give you the freedom to run modified versions of the code in production. Pretty big difference compared to Open Source.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#62

Post by pritambaral » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #4

This is an interesting window into their business model. This could be a purely an altruistic decision, which businesses sometimes do, contrary to popular belief. More likely it's a bet that wider adoption from making the clustered version free will drive more revenue through their managed database as a service offering. Which shows that their non-OSI open-source license is actually leading to more code and features…

> The additional restriction in the timescaledb license that you can't run a paid database as a service offering affects hardly anyone negatively (AWS).

That's not the only additional restriction. The Timescale License does not give you the freedom to run modified versions of the code in production. Pretty big difference compared to Open Source.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#63

Post by akulkarni » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

psankar wrote: post #50

Are 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.

Not sure, but if you post that question to the TimescaleDB Slack [0] you might get an answer there.

[0] https://slack.timescale.com/

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#64

Post by nojvek » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

akulkarni wrote: post #16

eloff wrote: post #4

This is an interesting window into their business model. This could be a purely an altruistic decision, which businesses sometimes do, contrary to popular belief. More likely it's a bet that wider adoption from making the clustered version free will drive more revenue through their managed database as a service offering. Which shows that their non-OSI open-source license is actually leading to more code and features…

(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 admire the `except the cloud providers`. What GCP, Azure and AWS have done with paid Redis offerings make me curious what @antirez (Salvator) thinks about it. They're making billions off Redis while the core contributors get nothing. I guess they agreed to it by having their work as BSD licence.

I do think there is a place for royalty based software. Free for personal and development use. For production use, you pay a small royalty to have it on the cloud. It's a win win on both sides. User gets managed offering + support + ability to look at source code, db/service authors get sustainable revenue, cloud providers get their usual PaaS cut.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#65

Post by gigatexal » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

atanasovskib wrote: post #52

gigatexal wrote: post #35

How does TimescaleDB work as a traditional OLTP db? Can I run general analytical queries on it and leverage its distributed nature? Or is it better for single table append only workloads?

The Hypertables and Distributed Hypertables can be used to store any kind of data, but works best as long as it has a monotonously increasing partitioning key (e.g. time), with high ingest load, few data modifications (preferable bulked) The beauty of TimescaleDB being built on Postgres is you can have your regular Postgres tables (OLTP schema) and time-series data (Hypertables) live side by side. Use 1 language (1 m…

This sounds like the perfect fit to a write only event log table we stored in postgres at a previous employer. I pushed to move it to BigQuery but this sounds like it would have been fine.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#66

Post by pritambaral » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

akulkarni wrote: post #16

eloff wrote: post #4

This is an interesting window into their business model. This could be a purely an altruistic decision, which businesses sometimes do, contrary to popular belief. More likely it's a bet that wider adoption from making the clustered version free will drive more revenue through their managed database as a service offering. Which shows that their non-OSI open-source license is actually leading to more code and features…

(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…

> and make the source code available

It's available to _see_, but not to "prepare, compile, and test Derivative Works of the TSL Licensed Software Source Code" in a production environment, as per your license's clause 2.1 (d). That's a pretty big departure from open-source; and a bit discouraging for use by non-mega-cloud business interests too. One of the important reasons I personally use and support open-source is the freedom to not only inspect (which the TSL provides) but to also not have to ask someone else and wait on them to make any changes I need to the software I use. Any chance the TSL can be modified to include this freedom too?

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#67

Post by eitland » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #37

eitland wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Frankly the pedantry around the definition of Open Source, which I understand, is incredibly nauseating. Sure, this isn't Open Source by "the definition", but it's close enough if you squint. The difference doesn't impact almost anyone. Are you or someone you love impacted by this licensing decision? Throw in an expiry date, dual licensing (pay to play seems more than fair) and I'm content. History be damned. I'm so…

> Frankly the pedantry around the definition of Open Source, which I understand, is incredibly nauseating. Sure, this isn't Open Source by "the definition", but it's close enough if you squint. The difference doesn't impact almost anyone. Are you or someone you love impacted by this licensing decision?

If we had accepted this line of reasoning Open Source had been a synonym for source available by now.

For those who wasn't there when it happened you just have to believe us old timers that some companies tried to pass of all kinds of almost-open-source-but-you-are-still-trapped deals almost since the term was coined.

Now even Microsoft have learned but it seems the war against misinformation isn't over yet.

> Throw in an expiry date, dual licensing (pay to play seems more than fair) and I'm content. History be damned.

Fine. I'm not against everything except open source. and I'll happily use it but why why why do you have to call it something that means something else?

Why not call it source available or something?

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#68

Post by pritambaral » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #64

akulkarni wrote: post #16

Earlier 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 admire the `except the cloud providers`. What GCP, Azure and AWS have done with paid Redis offerings make me curious what @antirez (Salvator) thinks about it. They're making billions off Redis while the core contributors get nothing. I guess they agreed to it by having their work as BSD licence. I do think there is a place for royalty based software. Free for personal and development use. For production use, you pa…

> make me curious what @antirez (Salvator) thinks about it. They're making billions off Redis while the core contributors get nothing. I guess they agreed to it by having their work as BSD licence.

Here's what Salvatore has to say (from http://antirez.com/news/120):

"About myself, I’ll keep writing BSD code for Redis. For Redis modules I’ll develop, such as Disque, I’ll pick AGPL instead, for similar reasons: we live in a “Cloud-poly”, so it’s a good idea to go forward with licenses that will force other SaaS companies to redistribute back their improvements. However this does not apply to Redis itself. Redis at this point is a 10 years collective effort, the base for many other things that we can do together, and this base must be as available as possible, that is, BSD licensed."

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#69

Post by akulkarni » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

gen220 wrote: post #46

I 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 TD…

TimescaleDB is packaged as a Postgres extension. The "more than an extension" is meant to highlight that TimescaleDB makes changes and adds capabilities far beyond what the typical extension does.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#70

Post by GordonS » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #40

akulkarni wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

I use TimescaleDB for mass storage and query of security events (up to 100s of millions) - the speed of queries and aggregate queries even on a single node is very impressive.

I haven't done anything with regards to anomaly/trend detection yet, but it's planned. Not really sure where you see a database (TimescaleDB) fitting into that though?