November 2022 Summaries

AWS re:Invent is a major tech event that will take place from November 28 to December 2, where around 50,000 attendees are expected. The Timescale Team will be present at the event, including co-founders Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman, who will discuss the future of cloud databases and answer questions about Timescale Cloud and Promscale. The team will also showcase their products through demos, including a Lightning Talk titled "Transform Your Business With Time-Series Data" that highlights how time-series data is driving innovation in various industries. Additionally, the team will be at booth 452 at The Venetian, where they'll provide swag, answer questions, and offer personalized assistance to attendees.

Florian Herrengt, co-founder of Nocodelytics, shares how his company uses TimescaleDB to track millions of user interactions per day and build dazzling analytics dashboards for website building and hosting platform Webflow. By using a wide table layout, they have reduced their query cost by six times, making it possible to handle large amounts of data without sacrificing performance. Nocodelytics started with PostgreSQL but found that TimescaleDB provided faster performance and was easier to use, with features like compression and indexing that helped mitigate storage and schema flexibility trade-offs. With TimescaleDB, they can now scale their database to handle billions of rows, leveraging features like tablespaces and data tiering to optimize storage space. The company is excited to continue using TimescaleDB and exploring its features, such as time_bucket_gapfill() and histogram(), to further improve performance and reliability.

Timescale Cloud`, a cloud-hosted PostgreSQL service, offers performance and cost efficiency advantages over `Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL`. Performance benchmarks show that `Timescale Cloud` can ingest data up to 44% faster, queries up to 350x faster, and store data at 95% less size. The database provides features like hypertables, continuous aggregates, query planner improvements, hyperfunctions, job scheduling, and native columnar compression for cost efficiency. Additionally, `Timescale Cloud` offers a rich collection of time-series features that weren't used in the benchmark, including analytical hyperfunctions, skip scan, and retention policies. The service is free to use for 30 days with no credit card required.

PostgreSQL's upgrade process is often daunting due to its reputation for being laborious and potentially error-prone. However, the community recommends upgrading as soon as possible to take advantage of new features and security patches. The best approach depends on various factors such as the size of the change, performance gains, security fixes, and built-in function improvements. A general guideline is to upgrade major versions when they reach a minor version (e.g., 10.2, 11.2, 12.2), minor upgrades as available, and immediately if more than two major versions are behind. Timescale Cloud offers an automated approach to upgrading PostgreSQL versions, allowing users to safely test and deploy new versions with minimal downtime. By using the platform's features such as database forks and service upgrades, users can plan their upgrades ahead of time and minimize potential disruptions.