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

TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

blog.timescale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 203 posts

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#91

Post by mfreed »

nwsm wrote: post #89

On topic: While the comparison seems terrible for Timestream, as a customer who does not want to manage my databases I would love a similar GCP option, if the product had better tradeoffs. It's also interesting that Timescale attributes this AWS product to their own licensing. They had some much discussed [0] developments on that front, and if it did in fact force AWS to build their own implementation, that seems lik…

Hi @nwsm: Timescale offers a fully managed version of TimescaleDB on AWS, GCP, and Azure, starting at $49/month.

https://www.timescale.com/timescale-signup

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#92

Post by ramraj07 »

zachd1_618 wrote: post #73
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…

I think AWS is early to offer a not-yet-matured product just to get it in front of customers and start gathering real usage feedback. I’d consider dynamo a fantastic tier 1 service, but it wasn’t always that way. This is inline with the Amazon philosophy in general. As for “making something for the sake of having it”, I believe the key reason for building their own applications is that they can build it on the same m…

Which deepdive talk are you recommending?

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#93

Post by nwsm »

mfreed wrote: post #91
nwsm wrote: post #89

On topic: While the comparison seems terrible for Timestream, as a customer who does not want to manage my databases I would love a similar GCP option, if the product had better tradeoffs. It's also interesting that Timescale attributes this AWS product to their own licensing. They had some much discussed [0] developments on that front, and if it did in fact force AWS to build their own implementation, that seems lik…

Hi @nwsm: Timescale offers a fully managed version of TimescaleDB on AWS, GCP, and Azure, starting at $49/month. https://www.timescale.com/timescale-signup

Thank you. At that price it's probably overkill for me, but I wish you had more info on your site that wasn't gated by a signup. How is the product managed in my GCP environment?

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#94

Post by drpebcak »

rafaelturk wrote: post #90

Little bit Offtopic: From a Dev perspective how TimescaleDB is better/worse than regular postgresql?

It is a postgresql extension that you install on top of a normal postgresql server, so it is not worse in any way.

Timescale works by creating a 'hypertable', which is an aggregate of a lot of smaller 'chunk' tables. These chunk tables are automatically split by date or incrementing id. This means that for queries that specify IDs or a date range within a certain range, you only have to query results within a few chunks, instead of looking through all the contents of the entire 'hypertable.' [1]

Timescale also offers some other things like compression which can save you up to ~96% disk space while also improving query performance in some cases. [2][3]

It also has something they call 'continuous aggregates' [4], which are similar to postgresql's materialized views, but do not require manual refreshing - they instead update periodically through an automatic background job. There is also a feature which builds on this called 'realtime aggregates' that allows you to combine the data within a continuous aggregate with the raw data in the tables that has yet to be materialized.

There are a lot more things besides that, but I think that's a decent overview of the major features it brings to the table. From a dev perspective these things all make the data and the database easier to work with (especially targeting timeseries data). There is an api reference [5] that has some of the other commands timescale adds, if you want to see some of the other things it can help you do.

[1] https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/hypertab... [2] https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/compress... [3] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compressio... [4] https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... [5] https://docs.timescale.com/latest/api

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#95

Post by whimsicalism »

dhagz wrote: post #65
tester34 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes I'm not even sure they're re-inventing, just adding a vender-lock-in layer on top of the service and making it run on Lambda so they can advertise it as "web-scale".

Yeah, although not on the AGPL licensed services.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#96

Post by whimsicalism »

superzamp wrote: post #9
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…

I remember the announcement of Sagemaker at an AWS summit, a moment of profound embarrassment - the whole thing was barely a Jupyter notebook glued to some EC2 stuff with duct tape. You're right, they're definitely doing things for the sole purpose of locking you in.

I still do not understand any of the value add of Sagemaker.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#98

Post by sudhirj »

This reads like a Postgres vs DynamoDB comparison, because that’s likely what it is.

The article makes a lot of points really well, and if I had 8 highly qualified people who had nothing else to do on my team working for free (or on salaries that were a rounding error in my actual and opportunity cost budget), I’d certainly get them to learn and use Timescale. But I don’t right now, so I’m going to use the option that gives me a time series DB with three or four clicks, gets the job done, and charges me for deployment and maintenance amortised across thousands of other customers.

Having these arguments purely on cost of service terms is a very slippery slope. Yes, it’s less dollars paid in hardware if I put my life on hold and learn how to configure this. Or pay someone else to do it. Yes, it’s cheaper if I order parts on newegg, build a server, drive to a colo and install it in the rack, and then drive there again each time something breaks. And yes, it’s even cheaper if I run it off a Raspberry Pi duct taped under my desk. No one is disputing these things.

AWS and other cloud providers sell peace of mind, acquisition and procurement speed, professional maintenance and remediation, deep integration, faster development and testing, and infrastructure management - with servers thrown in for free. Timescale sells time series database software. This is not a valid comparison.

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#99

Post by crescentfresh »

deepstack wrote: post #40
crescentfresh wrote: post #31

> 224x cheaper if you’re self-managing TimescaleDB on a VM I'm having a hard time understanding the cost comparison without details of the above. Are they saying that hosting your own cluster of timescaledb nodes within EC2 still comes in cheaper than timestream? This seems impossible, depending on the instance types of course.

if you self-host is always cheaper than using AWS. It also keep you not have to lock down to a vendor. AWS use to be great when it first came out in 2006ish, but now it is just because a pain to work with. EDIT: especially considering all the other options are available in VPS now days.

This depends on what AWS service we're talking about, doesn't it? For example a Kinesis stream compared to running a (say) 5 EC2 node Kafka cluster with zookeeper etc. Isn't it within the realm of possibility the managed service comes out cheaper?

Re: TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

#100

Post by chrissnell »

I looked at Timestream at my previous job and my research left me thinking, "Who uses this thing?". Expensive but most annoying of all, the only Grafana plugin was in private paid beta. It looks like they've finally open-sourced it.
Post reply on HN