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TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

blog.timescale.com

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Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#11

Post by tester34 »

jpgvm wrote: post #5

Not a surprising result at all. Timestream is another case of AMS trying to make something for the sake of having it (see here Kinesis instead of just doing Kafka and many other products) instead of just adopting something industry standard. That isn't to say they don't do some good stuff just they also ship a lot of crap, very much 2 tiers of products in the AWS catalog. I would eventually like to see comparison for…

Working at AWS must be fun

You basically reinvent all the stuff - from databases to all avaliable tooling

normal companies dont do that, so there' an opportunity to get deep into some specific branch of applied informatics.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#12

Post by shin_lao »

jpgvm wrote: post #5

Not a surprising result at all. Timestream is another case of AMS trying to make something for the sake of having it (see here Kinesis instead of just doing Kafka and many other products) instead of just adopting something industry standard. That isn't to say they don't do some good stuff just they also ship a lot of crap, very much 2 tiers of products in the AWS catalog. I would eventually like to see comparison for…

In a recent webinar for capital markets, AWS didn't even try to advertise Timestream, they talked about the three most popular tsdb in finance and that's it.

Source: https://pages.awscloud.com/awsmp-h2-fin-time-series-database...

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#13

Post by k__ »

tester34 wrote: post #11
jpgvm wrote: post #5

Not a surprising result at all. Timestream is another case of AMS trying to make something for the sake of having it (see here Kinesis instead of just doing Kafka and many other products) instead of just adopting something industry standard. That isn't to say they don't do some good stuff just they also ship a lot of crap, very much 2 tiers of products in the AWS catalog. I would eventually like to see comparison for…

Working at AWS must be fun You basically reinvent all the stuff - from databases to all avaliable tooling normal companies dont do that, so there' an opportunity to get deep into some specific branch of applied informatics.

I think, the difference is that AWS already has a bunch of core services that scale and uses them as a base for new services. (MongoDB->DocumentDB)

Also, they hear about the problems some customers have with an existing product and try to (re)invent a better solution. (MySQL->Aurora)

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#14

Post by mpsq »

I can't get over the fact that they first say:

"Amazon has a history of offering services that take advantage of the R&D efforts of others: for example, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka,[...]"

And at the end of the article they promote how they themselves rely on other people hard work:

"TimescaleDB uses a dramatically different design principle: build on PostgreSQL. As noted previously, this allows TimescaleDB to inherit over 25 years of dedicated engineering effort that the entire PostgreSQL community has done to build a rock-solid database that supports millions of applications worldwide."

In the end, it sounds like they are doing exactly what Amazon is doing with open-source.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#15

Post by jrnkntl »

tester34 wrote: post #11
jpgvm wrote: post #5

Not a surprising result at all. Timestream is another case of AMS trying to make something for the sake of having it (see here Kinesis instead of just doing Kafka and many other products) instead of just adopting something industry standard. That isn't to say they don't do some good stuff just they also ship a lot of crap, very much 2 tiers of products in the AWS catalog. I would eventually like to see comparison for…

Working at AWS must be fun You basically reinvent all the stuff - from databases to all avaliable tooling normal companies dont do that, so there' an opportunity to get deep into some specific branch of applied informatics.

They even name their annual event this way[1]

[1] https://reinvent.awsevents.com

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#16

Post by Aeolun »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #7
jpgvm wrote: post #5

Not a surprising result at all. Timestream is another case of AMS trying to make something for the sake of having it (see here Kinesis instead of just doing Kafka and many other products) instead of just adopting something industry standard. That isn't to say they don't do some good stuff just they also ship a lot of crap, very much 2 tiers of products in the AWS catalog. I would eventually like to see comparison for…

It seems like AWS is just focusing on increasing it's vendor lock in and it makes sense not just from the AWS point of view but if you're a developer at an enterprise company that has authorised AWS the more databases the clone, poorly or badly the more choice you have without having to get authorisation and the cost doesn't matter to the developer since the enterprise company is paying for it. I suspect there are ma…

But you can just run timescaleDB inside your amazon VPC. No need to use their services at all.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#17

Post by hardwaresofton »

I'm very towards Postgres and resultingly Timescale for being one of it's biggest shining stars. Combine that with a cynical view that this is essentially S-tier content marketing (in the tech world), and the numbers are still bonkers.

Might as well add on a bit here -- if you're into this sort of thing you might enjoy Timescale thrashing other purpose-built databases (which have since also improved so YMMV):

- Timescale vs Influx[0]

- Timescale vs Mongo[1]

- Timescale vs Cassandra[2]

These blog posts are all from the timescale side, but the numbers are undeniable and their methodology is open source -- not sure there's more you can ask. Cassandra probably scales better at FB/Twitter scale, but with the recent work done to improve Timescale's scaling features[3] and the permissive license (unless you're an Amazon) I'm not sure even that is a real benefit.

I'd love to see a response from Amazon -- if HN is so lucky to have a dev who worked on AWS Timestream that would be awesome.

[0]: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-influxdb-for-...

[1]: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-to-store-time-series-dat...

[2]: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/time-series-data-cassandra-v...

[3]: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-2-0-a-multi-node...

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#18

Post by rattray »

mpsq wrote: post #14

I can't get over the fact that they first say: "Amazon has a history of offering services that take advantage of the R&D efforts of others: for example, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka,[...]" And at the end of the article they promote how they themselves rely on other people hard work: "TimescaleDB uses a dramatically different design principle: build on PostgreSQL. As noted pr…

Except timescaledb is open source: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#19

Post by ryanbooz »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #17

I'm very towards Postgres and resultingly Timescale for being one of it's biggest shining stars. Combine that with a cynical view that this is essentially S-tier content marketing (in the tech world), and the numbers are still bonkers. Might as well add on a bit here -- if you're into this sort of thing you might enjoy Timescale thrashing other purpose-built databases (which have since also improved so YMMV): - Times…

We've made every effort to be open about all of the testing we do and many people outside of Timescale contribute to TSBS.

As an aside, we tried to solicit help/feedback on both Twitter and Redit groups. One AWS employee reached out and offered to pass it to the team (I was upfront about what we were doing) - but we never heard back.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#20

Post by hardwaresofton »

mpsq wrote: post #14

I can't get over the fact that they first say: "Amazon has a history of offering services that take advantage of the R&D efforts of others: for example, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka,[...]" And at the end of the article they promote how they themselves rely on other people hard work: "TimescaleDB uses a dramatically different design principle: build on PostgreSQL. As noted pr…

There's a big difference -- that's how the PostgreSQL community works. 2ndQuadrant (now EDB), EDB, Citus (now Microsoft) all add value to open source Postgres, contribute back to the community by bringing new features, new life, usecases, and of course committing changes upstream where possible. Timescale is actually on the more open side of that balance, with the licensing and the community version feature matrix.

Also, in this case, Timescale actually has a pretty forgiving license[0] as long as you are not a add-nothing-aaS-provider, perhaps more than it should be, which I've asked about before[1]. Even before that change was made, running just the community edition as a add-nothing-aaS-provider would have been an improvement on the status quo, given how soundly it thrashed some other solutions in the past (ex. Influx[2]) and what you can do it (promscale[3]).

I know it can't be all roses, nothing is, but I don't think they've put too many feet wrong so far.

[EDIT] - I should note that on the scale of "contributing" to Postgres, the scale heavily tips in favor of 2ndQuadrant, EDB, and Citus as obviously they have the most committers and core team members. All those companies are to be commended of course, they're making postgres work as businesses and keeping it free while also improving it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579905

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24585564

[2]: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-influxdb-for-...

[3]: https://github.com/timescale/promscale

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