Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

blog.timescale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 220 posts

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#101

Post by jakaroo »

mfreed wrote: post #85
jakaroo wrote: post #56

How does the multi-node version work with data compression compared to the single-node version? I like how on a single-node I can utilize data compression and get a 95% storage saving.

In the current version, you can execute `compress_chunks` on each of the data nodes and enjoy those same savings (and will work transparently with queries, as before). In subsequent releases, we'll add full support of compression, e.g., just create a compression policy on the access node and you are off and running.

Sounds great. So I just manually execute this `compress_chunks` command once on each data node and then I have compression enabled forever on those nodes?

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#103

Post by amenod »

pritambaral wrote: post #66
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…

> 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…

This. I don't care if I can see the source code if I can't actually _do_ anything with it. If I can't run my modifications in production, it doesn't guard me against vendor lock-in and it doesn't give me the right-to-repair. So what's the benefit?

Note that I am not arguing for OSS licences, but something like the Commons Clause (use freely, even for commercial use, repair as you wish, just don't sell) seems much more suitable for such cases imho. It protects the business from cloud providers, while still offering some basic protections to the users. This... doesn't.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#104

Post by lukevp »

pritambaral wrote: post #100
lukevp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really an issue in practice? For libraries (react, jquery) that can’t be used on their own as a product, a lot are adopting MIT. For a “service” - mongodb, redis, rabbitmq, Kafka, Postgres, etc. I have never run into an issue where I would be comfortable modifying something, rebuilding source and deploying into production.

> I have never ... _You_ may not have, but plenty of us have. Although, it's not as important when or how many times one has _needed_ to exercise one's freedoms, as it is to have them. But yes, plenty of us open-source users and supporters have exercised this very freedom. In fact, quite a lot of open-source contributions happen _because_ of this freedom: someone has an itch, they scratch it, and _then_ they upstream…

Is that not possible under this license, to upstream a change? It sounds like you can’t put the change into production without it first being accepted, but not that you couldn’t contribute in other ways. I get the spirit of your argument. However, the issue is that companies are not able to make open-source compatible, permissive licenses that allow commercial use due to the new reality that creating a service and supporting a product are the main moneymakers. The code is not itself valuable to them but it is valuable as a holistic system because it’s an already built and adopted and production ready standardization of an idea.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#105

Post by mfreed »

bithavoc wrote: post #34
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…

Can this license be used to, say, create a Datadog-like SaaS powered by TimescaledDB?

In most cases, yes, the license will permit this.

(There is discussion elsewhere in this threads about whether you give DDL access to your users, i.e., they themselves define schemas, tables, indexes, etc. Otherwise, Datadog is primarily a Value Added Service over just the database; huge numbers of companies utilize Timescale for building their SaaS services.)

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#106

Post by athinath »

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…

A couple examples from Timescale users which might be relevant to your use case:

ShiftLeft - code analysis and security scanning to catch vulnerabilities [https://blog.shiftleft.io/time-series-at-shiftleft-e1f981969...]

k6 - a load testing tool that scales to 100k concurrent users, analyzes performance over time, etc. [https://www.timescale.com/case-studies/k6]

If you want to talk specific scenarios, you can reach out alex @ timescale or on Slack - slack.timescale.com.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#107

Post by bglusman »

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…

I think I agree with this sentiment with one caveat: (I didn't read their license in detail, but really for licenses like this which seems to be the broader topic)

Today Timescale offers Timescale-as-a-service, so this allows them a kind of soft-monopoly on being a paid provider for this, but do these licenses generally contain a provision such that if they no longer provide that service themselves, whether from going out of business or a pivot to another product, then someone else could step in and offer it in the future? Closed source products have often had a kind of source-code escrow arrangement so that if they go out of business, you're not stuck unable to fix your own bugs, but similarly, if part of the value in adopting it is that the paid service IS available, knowing that someone else can offer a compatible service if they disappear might be a nice reassurance for the license to offer.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#108

Post by gregmac »

lukevp wrote: post #96
pritambaral wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is this really an issue in practice? For libraries (react, jquery) that can’t be used on their own as a product, a lot are adopting MIT. For a “service” - mongodb, redis, rabbitmq, Kafka, Postgres, etc. I have never run into an issue where I would be comfortable modifying something, rebuilding source and deploying into production.

It's also a hedge against the company/project shutting down or pivoting in a radically different direction than you want.

All the things you listed are foundational pieces of technology that are incredibly risky+costly to swap out, so if you needed to, there's an option to continue with a fork. If the thing is popular enough, there's a good chance a community-driven effort will pop up, you can find consultants to work on code for you, or even a new company will form around it, letting you continue working on your core product (mostly) uninterrupted.

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#109

Post by mfreed »

heipei wrote: post #91
atanasovskib wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you are referring to is the TimescaleDB real-time aggregates https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... It allows you to define aggregations that are automatically used when quering the raw table if the query matches, and it also allows you to drow the raw data with a retention policy but keep the aggregated form ( https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... )

OK, but it looks like I still have to define these aggregates manually. I was really more talking about the standard use-case that folks used to use Graphite / rrdtool for: Keep track of real-time high-fidelity metrics while still being able to query aggressively-downsampled historical data for comparison, and doing so without having to configure anything.

Hi @heipei -- one thing to observe is that Graphite & rrdtool are designed for a specific monitoring use case, while TimescaleDB is a more general-purpose time-series database.

So what that means is that TimescaleDB has mechanisms to make it really easy to define downsampling (continuous aggregates, data retention policies), and even have queries that transparency query across the historical aggregates and new raw data (real-time aggregates, which parent pointed to, which isn't supported by InfluxDB).

What the database _by itself_ doesn't do is automatically create certain continuous aggregates on metrics immediately, because frankly, users' needs vary so much.

That said, we have built stacks/solutions that leverage TimescaleDB and do precisely that. For example, we just released a design doc and beta around our refreshed native integration with Prometheus, that addresses an extremely similar use case to Graphite / rrdtool. Because now this is automated, it defines many of these things out-of-the-box, so you don't need to configure anything. Check it out and input welcome!

https://tsdb.co/prom-design-doc

Re: Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

#110

Post by [deleted] »

pritambaral wrote: post #97
mfreed wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for clarification: This limitation only applies to code under the Timescale License, while most of our code is licensed under the Apache 2.

Of course, this discussion is not about code that _is_ open-source. It is about the code that isn't but some people would like us to believe is — and I'm quoting my parent comment here — "a perfectly acceptable example of "open source"".

[deleted]
Post reply on HN