How CERN Powers Ground-Breaking Physics with TimescaleDB

CERN, a leader in fundamental physics research, is addressing the challenges of managing high volumes of time-series data generated by its experiments, notably from the Large Hadron Collider, by transitioning to the NextGen Archiver (NGA) system. This initiative, launched in 2017 in collaboration with Siemens/ETM, seeks to overcome limitations of the legacy RDB Archiver system, which is tightly coupled with Oracle Database and plagued by technical debt. By opting for TimescaleDB as part of the NGA's pluggable backend architecture, CERN benefits from improved data storage, querying efficiency, and performance, particularly through TimescaleDB's support for time-series workloads, compression, and continuous aggregates. Benchmark testing indicated that TimescaleDB not only exceeds CERN's requirements for write throughput but also offers significant storage savings and improved query performance. With plans to fully deploy TimescaleDB in production by 2027, CERN aims to standardize it as an alternative to Oracle, leveraging its capabilities to meet the organization's rigorous data handling standards.