Summary

The past year has been an active one for the timeseries market. New products have been launched, more businesses have moved to streaming analytics, and the team at Timescale has been keeping busy. In this episode the TimescaleDB CEO Ajay Kulkarni and CTO Michael Freedman stop by to talk about their 1.0 release, how the use cases for timeseries data have proliferated, and how they are continuing to simplify the task of processing your time oriented events.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m welcoming Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman back to talk about how TimescaleDB has grown and changed over the past year

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you refresh our memory about what TimescaleDB is? How has the market for timeseries databases changed since we last spoke? What has changed in the focus and features of the TimescaleDB project and company? Toward the end of 2018 you launched the 1.0 release of Timescale. What were your criteria for establishing that milestone?

What were the most challenging aspects of reaching that goal?

In terms of timeseries workloads, what are some of the factors that differ across varying use cases?

How do those differences impact the ways in which Timescale is used by the end user, and built by your team?

What are some of the initial assumptions that you made while first launching Timescale that have held true, and which have been disproven? How have the improvements and new features in the recent releases of PostgreSQL impacted the Timescale product?

Have you been able to leverage some of the native improvements to simplify your implementation? Are there any use cases for Timescale that would have been previously impractical in vanilla Postgres that would now be reasonable without the help of Timescale?

What is in store for the future of the Timescale product and organization?

Contact Info

Ajay

@acoustik on Twitter LinkedIn

Mike

LinkedIn Website @michaelfreedman on Twitter

Timescale

Website Documentation Careers timescaledb on GitHub @timescaledb on Twitter

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

TimescaleDB Original Appearance on the Data Engineering Podcast 1.0 Release Blog Post PostgreSQL

Podcast Interview

RDS DB-Engines MongoDB IOT (Internet Of Things) AWS Timestream Kafka Pulsar

Podcast Episode

Spark

Podcast Episode

Flink

Podcast Episode

Hadoop DevOps PipelineDB

Podcast Interview

Grafana Tableau Prometheus OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) Oracle DB Data Lake

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

As communications between machines become more commonplace the need to store the generated data in a time-oriented manner increases. The market for timeseries data stores has many contenders, but they are not all built to solve the same problems or to scale in the same manner. In this episode the founders of TimescaleDB, Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman, discuss how Timescale was started, the problems that it solves, and how it works under the covers. They also explain how you can start using it in your infrastructure and their plans for the future.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your data pipelines or trying out the tools you hear about on the show. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support the show by checking out the Patreon page which is linked from the site. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman about Timescale DB, a scalable timeseries database built on top of PostGreSQL

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Timescale is and how the project got started? The landscape of time series databases is extensive and oftentimes difficult to navigate. How do you view your position in that market and what makes Timescale stand out from the other options? In your blog post that explains the design decisions for how Timescale is implemented you call out the fact that the inserted data is largely append only which simplifies the index management. How does Timescale handle out of order timestamps, such as from infrequently connected sensors or mobile devices? How is Timescale implemented and how has the internal architecture evolved since you first started working on it?

What impact has the 10.0 release of PostGreSQL had on the design of the project? Is timescale compatible with systems such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL?

For someone who wants to start using Timescale what is involved in deploying and maintaining it? What are the axes for scaling Timescale and what are the points where that scalability breaks down?

Are you aware of anyone who has deployed it on top of Citus for scaling horizontally across instances?

What has been the most challenging aspect of building and marketing Timescale? When is Timescale the wrong tool to use for time series data? One of the use cases that you call out on your website is for systems metrics and monitoring. How does Timescale fit into that ecosystem and can it be used along with tools such as Graphite or Prometheus? What are some of the most interesting uses of Timescale that you have seen? Which came first, Timescale the business or Timescale the database, and what is your strategy for ensuring that the open source project and the company around it both maintain their health? What features or improvements do you have planned for future releases of Timescale?

Contact Info

Ajay

LinkedIn @acoustik on Twitter Timescale Blog

Mike

Website LinkedIn @michaelfreedman on Twitter Timescale Blog

Timescale

Website @timescaledb on Twitter GitHub

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Timescale PostGreSQL Citus Timescale Design Blog Post MIT NYU Stanford SDN Princeton Machine Data Timeseries Data List of Timeseries Databases NoSQL Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) Object Relational Mapper (ORM) Grafana Tableau Kafka When Boring Is Awesome PostGreSQL RDS Google Cloud SQL Azure DB Docker Continuous Aggregates Streaming Replication PGPool II Kubernetes Docker Swarm Citus Data

Website Data Engineering Podcast Interview

Database Indexing B-Tree Index GIN Index GIST Index STE Energy Redis Graphite Prometheus pg_prometheus OpenMetrics Standard Proposal Timescale Parallel Copy Hadoop PostGIS KDB+ DevOps Internet of Things MongoDB Elastic DataBricks Apache Spark Confluent New Enterprise Associates MapD Benchmark Ventures Hortonworks 2σ Ventures CockroachDB Cloudflare EMC Timescale Blog: Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data

The intro and outro music is from a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/Love_death_and_a_drunken_monkey/04_-_The_Hug?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss" target="_blank"…