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TimescaleDB raises $40M

blog.timescale.com

111–120 of 143 posts

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#111
Congrats to the tsdb team. I've tried the database extension months ago and it works perfect for my use case standalone. I just need to integrate it with Django, which is not easy given the current schema of the database and the way Django creates defaults autoincrements and PK, but I'm sure there will be a workaround for that.

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#112

TimescaleDB is a great product, but if you plan to go with them long term, there are few points to consider: * They are still trying to figure out their monetization strategy. Initially, they betted on their on-premise Enterprise version, then abandoned it. Now they are pushing their cloud version. * Even though most of their code licensed under Apache license, some code is under their proprietary license. * I'm sure…

People want to buy services not software, that's why they go to the cloud in the first place. Vendors keep fighting this to their own detriment so it's nice to see Timescale is actually giving customers what they want.

Modifying business models to optimize for success is a good thing, not a negative.

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#113
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi @spmurrayzzz thanks for the feedback. (Timescale person) Always strive to do the best and fairest benchmarks we can, and for that reason, all our benchmarks are fully open-source for both repeatability and improvements/contributions: https://github.com/timescale/tsbs/blob/master/docs/mongo.md We also really did spend a lot of time investigating approaches with MongoDB, so you'll see our benchmarks actually evaluat…

Thanks for engaging here, and congrats on the round! I've reviewed all these resources multiple times in the past, which is what prompted me to do my own benchmarks (in which mongo outperforms both multinode and single node configurations). Some issues I noticed: - youre using gopkg.in/mgo.v2 which is a mongo driver that hasn't had a release in 6 years. Not sure of the general performance impact here, but my tests us…

Thanks for the concrete feedback/suggestions!

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#114
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually see a bunch of startups directly going after that market leader in historian space that are building on _top_ of TimescaleDB. So they can bring their domain expertise in process manufacturing and elsewhere, and then build on a modern, powerful platform. We're excited to see this!

I would love to known of some alternatives to Rockwell, wonder ware, Schneider to propose to our customers. What startups are building on top of timescale?

Well...not a startup, but Schneider's latest-gen EcoStruxure platform is based on TimescaleDB =)

https://ecostruxure-building-help.se.com/bms/Topics/show.cas...

But feel free to hit me up at mike@timescale or mike on slack.timescale.com.

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#115
post #31

> When we launched TimescaleDB, we met a fair amount of skepticism.... The top voted Hacker News comment at the time called us, “a rather bad idea[0].” Good old HN with its healthy skepticism :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14036554

Having been on HN long enough, what I look for during any idea/startup launch is polarization and intensity of viewpoints. If people are reacting to the idea (for better or worse), it means its had an impact. Those are often the products that find success. A no-comment launch is far worse than one riddled with criticism. IMO HN's classic "skepticism" is usually just engineering nerd insecurity projected outwards, wit…

Your comment sounds like wild projection in itself. Most skepticism is based on wisdom and experience gained over years of working in the industry and noticing the patterns of 100s of past companies and projects.

Timescale when it first launched was little more than an automatic-sharding extension for Postgres with some convenience functions for handling time data. It was competing with Postgres itself which added native partitions, other sharding extensions like Citus, and an entire class of column-oriented relational databases that have become much more capable.

Timescale today is very different and has added a lot of the missing functionality to make it a very attractive database option, especially the columnstore/compression feature mentioned in that first HN comment.

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#116

I think idea and promise of Timescale is great, but current(well actually I tried it 1 year ago) state of things makes it very hard to choose Timescale over Clickhouse. I've tried to setup simple Twitter parser for trends analysis, so I needed few thousand counters every few seconds. While I did not encounter any perfomance issues, size on disk was a huge deal. I don't remember precise numbers, but Clickhouse used fe…

I think ClickHouse is underestimated as a database for time series. Many companies using it for analytics purposes (like Cloudflare [0]), for logs processing (like Uber [1]). I'm just waiting when someone builds something outstanding for monitoring. Articles like [2] shows ClickHouse potential in this area.

Btw, ClickHouse is under Apache 2 license, which makes it much easier to use in big companies.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-analytics-for-6m-requests-p...

[1] https://eng.uber.com/logging/

[2] https://altinity.com/blog/clickhouse-for-time-series

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#117

I think idea and promise of Timescale is great, but current(well actually I tried it 1 year ago) state of things makes it very hard to choose Timescale over Clickhouse. I've tried to setup simple Twitter parser for trends analysis, so I needed few thousand counters every few seconds. While I did not encounter any perfomance issues, size on disk was a huge deal. I don't remember precise numbers, but Clickhouse used fe…

Did you turn on compression in TSDB?

Is there any reason why it is not turned on by default?

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#118

TimescaleDB is a great product, but if you plan to go with them long term, there are few points to consider: * They are still trying to figure out their monetization strategy. Initially, they betted on their on-premise Enterprise version, then abandoned it. Now they are pushing their cloud version. * Even though most of their code licensed under Apache license, some code is under their proprietary license. * I'm sure…

they betted Just in case you're not a native English speaker: The verb "to bet" is irregular and the past tense is simply "they bet" rather than "betted" (which would be far more logical).

Thanks for pointing out! You're right, I'm not a native speaker. Some dictionaries list it as an alternative form though: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/bet

Re: TimescaleDB raises $40M

#119

I guess this is an unpopular opinion, but I’ve found InfluxDB to be superb for being trivial to get going in a high performance way. I have never touched InfluxDB Cloud - always just InfluxDB either as an arbitrary process or container. Examples of where I’ve found InfluxDB to be more pleasant: * InfluxDB has way better documentation on functions. For example, look up moving average by time (not points) on TimescaleD…

Funny, I started using InfluxDB in several projects, but threw it out immediately when TimescaleDB appeared because I thought TSDB seemed a lot more solid and well-designed. Influx seemed much more of a quick hack in comparison - I did not like the (Python?) SDK or the docs, and operational-wise it felt a little flaky compared to TimescaleDB. A disclaimer is that I'm very familiar w PostgreSQL since many years back, so TSDB operations felt very intuitive to me while Influx was all new stuff - that probably made a difference.
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