[georgewfraser]

I talked to the timescale CTO at pg conf a few years ago and asked him what timescale does differently than a standard columnar database that makes it better suited for time oriented data. He said a bunch of things and I said “but columnar databases do those things.” Then he got mad at me.

I guess it’s just another columnar dbms after all?

[dangoodmanUT]

They don't do well on benchmarks https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/

[jascha_eng]

I'd argue we do okay, but of course it's Clickhouses own benchmark it's hard to outperform them there. It's also not apples to apples. Clickhouse has much less transactional guarantees and isn't postgres SQL compatible. The great thing about Timescale is that you only need one DB for all your analytics and transactional needs. Combined with pgvector postgres also handles search quite well.

In a way Timescale is just postgres on steroids. Sure if you really know your use-case well, are fine with giving up some postgres nicenes, are willing to learn a new query language and are fine with using and syncing multiple data stores you'll outperform timescale. But I think it is still really cool to see how close you can get with essentially just a better postgres.

[akulkarni]

It depends on which benchmarks you use.

"ClickBench evaluates databases using a single table of clickstream data, representative of workloads like web analytics, BI, and log aggregation. It also favors full-table large scans and large-scale aggregations on denormalized data.

Real-time analytics inside applications is different and needs a new benchmark." [0]

This is why we published RTABench. [1]

We believe that it is more representative of real-time analytical workloads.

[0] https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/benchmarking-databases-for-re...

[1] https://rtabench.com/

[dengolius]

Yes, TigerData aka Timescale tried to make a fuss a few years ago comparing Clickhouse and TimescaleDB, but they failed.

[freilanzer]

DuckDB seems to be the most interesting there.

[viccis]

Do you think all time series databases (like InfluxDB for example) are useless compared to "columnar databases" that "do those things" or just Timescale?

[victorbjorklund]

it does sound like a pretty dumb question. Many things do similar things. That is like asking what postgres does that other sql databases doesnt.

[yuretz]

Few years have passed and your guess is still wrong.

[fellatio]

Unfair anecdote as you don't mention what he said before and after "he got mad" (whatever that means).