May 2021 Summaries

The Postgres community remains strong and vibrant after 30+ years of development, with nearly 450 developers participating in the second State of Postgres survey. The survey reveals that Postgres is being used more than ever, with 43% of respondents reporting increased usage over the past year, while 52% reported using it "a lot more" or even "more than we did last year." The top reasons for choosing Postgres are reliability and SQL, two key factors that contributed to its popularity. Developers also report high levels of satisfaction with the community's documentation quality, helpfulness, and available resources. However, respondents highlight areas for improvement, including code contribution and development processes, as well as a possible fragmentation within the community. To address these concerns, Timescale aims to build a more welcoming and inclusive industry through its hiring practices and community stewardship efforts.

To close out our first week of Always Be Launching month, we are announcing the “Explorer”, a new feature in our cloud-native database service designed to be your easy-to-use “operations center”. We've focused on building a fast and scalable database that's also easy and worry-free. However, developers want full control over their services while ceding operations and management to a third-party. Our belief is that it's possible to strike a balance between worry-free and control. To continue serving developers, we've launched cloud services that offer managed TimescaleDB, including Timescale Cloud. It provides a richer administrative dashboard for understanding the state of your database instance, which we call the Explorer. The Explorer gives you insight into both basic and advanced aspects of your database, providing higher-level overviews of your entire database and detailed information about hypertables, chunks, continuous aggregates, policies, and more.

TimescaleDB 2.2.1 introduces a feature called "Skip Scan" that vastly improves query times for DISTINCT queries on PostgreSQL tables, hypertables, and distributed hypertables. This implementation of the technique achieves 26x-8000x faster queries in tests. With Skip Scan, developers can retrieve recent data quickly, reducing latency in applications that rely on time-series data. The feature works by incrementally searching for each successive item in an ordered index, making it much more efficient than scanning the entire index. TimescaleDB is a relational database for time-series data, and this implementation makes it even better by supporting PostgreSQL's extensible architecture. By upgrading to TimescaleDB 2.2.1, users can experience immediate speed improvements in many of their DISTINCT queries, especially those that retrieve recent data or handle large volumes of ordered data. The feature is available today for self-managed TimescaleDB and will be included in upcoming releases for managed services.

We're excited to announce a $40 million Series B investment, led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from existing investors, to further develop our database technology. Our mission is to serve developers worldwide, enabling them to build exceptional data-driven products that measure everything that matters. We believe time-series data is ubiquitous and essential for making better decisions faster. TimescaleDB is a relational database for time-series, built on Postgres, offering massive scale, compression, query performance, and advanced features like continuous aggregates and real-time aggregation. Our core product is 100% free, open source, with optional cloud services available. We're committed to serving developers and the open-source community, giving back through contributions, market research, and sponsorships. In May, we'll be launching 10+ new features across our database, managed service, and observability products, aiming to make a significant impact in the industry.