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

Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 173 posts

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#31

Post by avthar »

thegreatpeter wrote: post #13

Am I the only one that's like "wtf is a time-series database compared to a normal one?"

This is actually an underrated question.

Time-series databases offer better performance and usability for dealing with time-series data (think DevOps metrics, data from IoT devices, stock prices etc, anything where you're monitoring and analyzing how things change over time)

They allow you answer questions where time is the main component of interest much more quickly and easily:

eg 1: IoT Sensors) Show me the average of temperature over all my devices over the past 3 days in 15 minute intervals

eg 2: Financial data) What's the price of stock X over the past 5 years

eg 3: DevOps data) What's the average memory and CPU used by all my servers of the past 5 mins

A normal database could be a purely relational database (e.g Postgres) or a non-relational database (e.g MongoDB). In both these cases, while you could use these databases for time-series data, they tend to offer worse performance at scale and a worse experience for doing common things (e.g real-time aggregations of data, data retention policies etc)

For more on time-series data and when you'd need a time-series database, check out: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/what-the-heck-is-time-series...

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#32

Post by mpsq »

shay_ker wrote: post #12

Absolutely love the story. TimescaleDB & InfluxDB have had a lot of posts on HN, so I'm sure others are wondering - how do we compare QuestDB to them? It sounds like performance is a big one, but I'm curious to hear your take on it.

As you said, performance is the main differentiator. We are orders of magnitude faster than TimescaleDB and InfluxDB on both data ingestion and querying. TimescaleDB relies on Postgres and has great SQL support. This is not the case for InfluxDB and this is where QuestDB shines: we do not plan to move away from SQL, we are very dedicated in bringing good support and some enhancements to make sure the querying language is as flexible and efficient as possible for our users.

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#33

Post by lpasselin »

santafen wrote: post #27
lpasselin wrote: post #17

Does postgres wire support mean QuestDB can be a drop-in replacement for a postgres database? Is this common?

QuestDB Head of DevRel here ... Yes, it can be a replacement of Postgres and it will be cheaper and faster. That being said, PGwire is still in alpha and is not 100% covered yet, so while migrating is possible, 100% Postgres Wire Protocol compatibility is not there yet. For traditional transactional RDBMS data, I don't think it's a very common choice. For Time Series data, QuestDB is by far the fastest choice for Pos…

This is great if it works well. Drop-in replacement would be great for systems with DB abstraction like in django, sqlalchemy.

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#35

Post by sirffuzzylogik »

jedberg wrote: post #6

How does your performance compare to Atlas? [0] [0] https://github.com/Netflix/atlas

I have not tried to benchmark Atlas but I am not sure the result would be meaningful. Atlas is an in-memory database, QuestDB persists to disk, the 2 are not very comparable.

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#36

Post by avthar »

mpsq wrote: post #32
shay_ker wrote: post #12

Absolutely love the story. TimescaleDB & InfluxDB have had a lot of posts on HN, so I'm sure others are wondering - how do we compare QuestDB to them? It sounds like performance is a big one, but I'm curious to hear your take on it.

As you said, performance is the main differentiator. We are orders of magnitude faster than TimescaleDB and InfluxDB on both data ingestion and querying. TimescaleDB relies on Postgres and has great SQL support. This is not the case for InfluxDB and this is where QuestDB shines: we do not plan to move away from SQL, we are very dedicated in bringing good support and some enhancements to make sure the querying languag…

Are there any performance comparisons to TimescaleDB and Influx that you can share? A blog post perhaps?

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#37

Post by joan4 »

Random_ernest wrote: post #30

Testing out the demo: SELECT * FROM trips WHERE tip_amount > 500 ORDER BY tip_amount DESC Very interesting :-)

thanks for trying the live demo. That's a very interesting result indeed. Btw, we are working on applying SIMD operations on filter queries (where clause) that will speed up the runtime of queries like that considerably.

Re: Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database

#38

Post by jaydub »

santafen wrote: post #27
lpasselin wrote: post #17

Does postgres wire support mean QuestDB can be a drop-in replacement for a postgres database? Is this common?

QuestDB Head of DevRel here ... Yes, it can be a replacement of Postgres and it will be cheaper and faster. That being said, PGwire is still in alpha and is not 100% covered yet, so while migrating is possible, 100% Postgres Wire Protocol compatibility is not there yet. For traditional transactional RDBMS data, I don't think it's a very common choice. For Time Series data, QuestDB is by far the fastest choice for Pos…

Yeah, I checked it out and wanted to use but a bunch of regular old SQL queries don't work. Please add support for the old fashioned group by syntax! (This will be helpful for getting to a true drop-in replacement!)
Post reply on HN