May 2020 Summaries

This is an installment of our “Community Member Spotlight” series, where we invite our customers to share their work, shining a light on their success and inspiring others with new ways to use technology to solve problems. Christoph Engelbert, co-founder of clevabit GmbH, joins us to share the work they're doing to power sustainable and transparent farming by giving farmers, mills, and consumers the metrics they need to make decisions. clevabit offers a platform that provides unseen insight into animal farming, barn environmental levels, and how these metrics influence animal health and farm operations. The company's customers range from farmers and hatcheries to feed mills, with the goal of enabling informed decision-making when buying meat or eggs. Christoph Engelbert shares his experience building the clevabit hardware and software platform, which relies heavily on a time-series database like TimescaleDB for fast queries and aggregations. He discusses the benefits of using TimescaleDB, including its ability to handle large amounts of IoT data and provide real-time insights into farm operations. The team's growth is in software engineering, mobile app development, and data science, with a focus on building a scalable system that can support their growing customer base. Christoph also emphasizes the importance of "using the right tool for the right job" and recommends prototyping and testing different approaches to solving complex problems.

Real-time aggregates are a new feature in TimescaleDB that allows for fast and accurate queries over high-volume time-series data. They build on continuous aggregates, which can improve query performance and optimize storage, but also introduce some latency. Real-time aggregation addresses this limitation by combining pre-computed aggregates with raw data from the underlying hypertable, providing up-to-date results while still enjoying the speedups of pre-computing a large portion of the result. This feature is particularly useful for use cases such as devops monitoring, real-time analytics, and IoT, where fast queries over high-volume workloads and accurate, real-time results really matter.

The DataPub virtual meetup focused on using open datasets to make the world a better place, and its second event was recently held with positive responses. The event featured guest speakers Mike Freedman from Timescale, Seán Lynch from OpenLitterMap, and John Gorman and Matt Magoffin from SolarNetwork Foundation, who shared their projects and experiences with open data, including using TimescaleDB to fight pollution and advocate for energy conservation. The event was well-received, and the organizers are looking forward to making it a long-running tradition when in-person events return. The next DataPub session will be held on May 19, featuring new guest speakers Chris Whong and Jonathan Leek, who will discuss "Taming the MTA's Unruly Turnstile Data" and "Building a City Vacancy Portal in St. Louis," respectively.

In April, Timescale released a range of technical content and updates, including the launch of their "Guide to Grafana 101" coding series and the release of TimescaleDB 1.7, which includes PG12 support and new features in the Community Edition. They also provided tutorials on data visualization and alerting using Grafana, alongside blogs explaining time-series compression algorithms and data handling. Virtual events like DataPub meetups focused on topics such as open data usage and geospatial data handling, while customer stories highlighted how companies like Blue Sky Analytics and k6 are leveraging data for environmental monitoring and system resilience. The newsletter also featured product updates, including tips on data compression and retention, and offered reading lists from the Timescale team to enrich knowledge on databases and user experience. The company emphasized community engagement through Slack and encouraged readers to subscribe to their biweekly newsletter for ongoing insights and updates.