TimescaleDB [2] is an open source Time Series database. It is an extension of PostgreSQL that optimises for time series data storage and processing [3]. As an extension of PostgreSQL, it is a fully relational database. It provides high levels of analytics abilities with SQL. TimescaleDB also benefits from the PostgreSQL ecosystem of a wide array of extensions, management tools, and visualisation dashboards. TimescaleDB transforms PostgreSQL tables into hypertables and optimise query planning and execution. Hypertables can also be easily deployed in a distributed environment and store data across multiple nodes [4], which could management by Kubernetes. TimescaleDB also includes hyperfunctions, which is a set of functions oriented to time series data analysis operations. They extend SQL to achieve fast execution time on time series queries.
Comparing with PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB has shown to be 20x faster at inserting large scale data [5]. TimescaleDB can achieve 1.2x to 5x better performance in time-based queries and 450x better performance in time-ordering queries [1]. Although, InfluxDB is current most popularly Time Series database, TimescaleDB is tested to perform high cardinality inserts 3.5x faster and outperforms InfluxDB by 3.4x to 71x on complex queries [6].
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Reference List
- Barez, F., Bilokon, P., & Xiong, R. (2023). Benchmarking Specialized Databases for High-frequency Data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.12561.
- Inc. T. Time-series data simplified — Timescale. 2022. Available from: https://www.timescale.com/
- Inc. T. Overview — Timescale Docs. 2022. Available from: https://docs.timescale.com/timescaledb/latest/overview/#accelerated-performance
- Inc. T. Distributed hypertables — Timescale Docs. 2022. Available from: https://docs.timescale.com/api/latest/distributed-hypertables/
- Kiefer R. TimescaleDB vs. PostgreSQL for time-series: 20x higher inserts, 2000x faster deletes, 1.2x-14,000x faster queries. 2017. Available from: https://www.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-6a696248104e/
- InfluxData. influxdb: open source time series database. 2022. Available from: https://www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-overview/
- DB-Engines Ranking of Time Series DBMS. https://db-engines.com/en/ranking/time+series+dbms. Accessed 20 Apr 2023