At Cloudflare, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse are used for transactional and analytical workloads, but the company chose TimescaleDB as the analytics plane for its Zero Trust product suite due to its simplicity, performance, and ease of use. The team prioritized launching a minimal and focused architecture, which allowed them to ship the initial version of the product quickly and gather early feedback from customers. They discovered that PostgreSQL's limitations in handling high-throughput batch inserts made ClickHouse less suitable for their needs. TimescaleDB was chosen because it offers columnstore and sparse indexes, automatic partition management, and continuous aggregates, which improved query performance and reduced storage costs. The company deployed a self-hosted TimescaleDB instance on its canary PostgreSQL cluster to compare its performance against vanilla Postgres. After a two-week backfill period, they saw 5x to 35x performance improvements, depending on the query type and time range. The team made adjustments to optimize TimescaleDB for their specific use case, including switching from bulk INSERTS to COPY, disabling synchronous replication, and relying on aggressive compression and sparse indexes. They found that TimescaleDB strikes a balance between simplicity and impressive performance, making it an ideal choice for their analytics needs.