October 2021 Summaries

Today, we are announcing function pipelines, a new capability that introduces functional programming concepts inside PostgreSQL (and SQL) using custom operators. Function pipelines radically improve the developer ergonomics of analyzing data in PostgreSQL and SQL, by applying principles from functional programming and popular tools like Python’s Pandas and PromQL. This allows developers to analyze data by composing multiple functions, leading to a simpler, cleaner way of expressing complex logic in PostgreSQL. The new capability is fully PostgreSQL compliant, meaning that any tool that speaks PostgreSQL will be able to support data analysis using function pipelines. Function pipelines are pre-loaded on each new database service on Timescale Cloud, available immediately, and can also be installed for free on existing PostgreSQL installations through the timescaledb_toolkit extension.

Promscale is an observability backend powered by SQL that enables developers to query their traces and metrics in a unified and complete SQL interface. With Promscale, users can leverage the power of SQL to analyze their observability data, including OpenTelemetry traces, Prometheus metrics, logs, and other future data types. The platform provides broad support for observability standards, operational simplicity, and familiar experience with PostgreSQL as its foundation. It also offers unparalleled insights through TimescaleDB's advanced time-series analytical functions and Postgres' SQL query capabilities. Promscale is designed to simplify integration in any environment and provide a single storage system that is easy to deploy, manage, scale, and learn about. The platform exposes an ingest endpoint that is OTLP-compliant, making it straightforward to integrate with OpenTelemetry instrumentation. Traces stored in Promscale can be queried with full SQL and visualized using Jaeger or Grafana.

"Our experience using Timescale Cloud has been fantastic. We're really impressed with the core technical innovations, particularly around hypertables and compression, and it solves a lot of problems for us as we work to build aggregated and derived data sets on top of our core tables. We're excited to see what Timescale continues to build in the future!"` This statement highlights the positive experience that one company has had with using Timescale Cloud, specifically mentioning its technical innovations such as hypertables and compression, which have solved problems for their use case. The sentiment is overwhelmingly positive, expressing excitement about what Timescale will continue to develop in the future.

TimescaleDB has released new features and content to help developers master time-series data analysis and PostgreSQL, including storage autoscaling, tutorials on AWS Lambda and TimescaleDB integration, and guides for C# .NET and Ruby development. The company also hosts virtual events, such as Write the Docs Prague and Timescale monthly Office Hours, and provides educational resources like blog posts and videos to support community growth and learning. Additionally, TimescaleDB offers tips and best practices for data analysis with percentile approximation, AWS Lambda for beginners, and creating custom monitoring and alerting solutions using Grafana and PostgreSQL.