Continuous aggregates were developed by Timescale to solve the challenge of aggregating massive amounts of data efficiently without querying billions of raw data rows. They use PostgreSQL materialized views to continuously and incrementally refresh a query in the background, reducing the amount of data that needs to be computed. The new version of continuous aggregates, available in TimescaleDB 2.8.1, offers significant performance improvements, including faster queries for common operations like counting rows, querying within time ranges, and applying filters. Additionally, it reduces storage costs by using a FILTER clause to store aggregated data without additional rows, and increases query flexibility with features like the HAVING clause at materialization time.