re:Invent With Timescale: How We’re Engaging With the Cloud Community

One of the best-known tech events in the world is back to inspire the global cloud community, and we couldn’t be more excited to be there as proud bronze sponsors. From November 28 to December 2, all roads (and URLs) lead to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, where organizers expect around 50,000 attendees on-site and a few thousand more online.

Ready to welcome them—just maybe not all at once—is your very own Timescale Team. As we hit “publish” on this blog post, a group of Timescalers from across the globe and the company (including our co-founders, Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman) are already at the event, ready to talk about the future of our cloud database and answer any questions you may have about Timescale and Promscale.

Catch up with our team at The Venetian, on booth 452, for some roaring swag (yes, we’re biased) and open technical conversations about all things time series, databases, and of course, cloud.

Lightning Talk at re:Invent: Transform Your Business With Time-Series Data

A talk not to be missed by developers and other technologists working to deliver applications in a world ruled by data, “Transform Your Business With Time-Series Data” highlights how time-series data is at the heart of the current data revolution.

Timescale’s senior director of developer advocacy, James Blackwood-Sewell, shows how time-series data drives innovation around us, from IoT-powered transportation networks to SaaS application analytics and autonomous financial trading algorithms. These innovations deliver continued value to businesses, schools, and communities of all sizes, all over the world.

If you want to learn how you can leverage time-series data for your business, allowing you to measure change in an evolving world and build powerful and scalable applications with Timescale and AWS, this Lightning Talk is for you.

Mark Your Calendar:

When: November 30, 4.45 p.m. – 5 p.m. PT

Where: VEN-Lightning, Theater 1

Session ID: PRT061

Booth Action

The great thing about conferences is not just talking to industry leaders and game-changers but also learning how things work under the hood from those who actually created them.

At booth 452, our re:Invent spot at The Venetian (check the map in the previous section for guidance and look out for the signature Timescale dark yellow and blue coloring), you’ll find Timescalers ready to welcome you, hand out fun swag, and learn more about your time-series projects and challenges.

And the best part: they’re also more than ready to help you overcome them. For AWS re:Invent 2022, the team has put together five demos targeting a number of business fields so you can see for yourself how Timescale’s products can boost your productivity, deliver an incredible user experience, and save costs for those developing applications in a wide range of industries. And, of course, you’ll have personalized assistance from our team to answer all your questions.

The Demos

Timescale’s platform features

First things first: we know we keep asking it, but have you met Timescale yet? If you’d like a proper introduction, stop by the Timescale booth. We’ll walk you through the main features of Timescale, showing you how Timescale can help you improve the performance of your time-series applications while keeping your storage bill low.  

If you want to check out our platform—which you can already do for free by signing up for a 30-day trial—this is the opportunity to do it in “guided tour” mode, with a Timescale Team member answering your questions and focusing on the most relevant features for your business.

Database core features

Haven’t tried Timescale yet? Not a problem! Join us in our booth, and we’ll walk you through the best TimescaleDB features that lend unique superpowers to PostgreSQL. We’ll tell you about hypertables (automatically partitioned time-series tables), continuous aggregates (automatically refreshed materialized views), the time_bucket function (to quickly build summaries with lower granularities for your dashboards and charts), and much more.

Timescale for finance

Financial data is time-series data. Many of our customers use Timescale to store and analyze financial and crypto data, including trading tick data, candlesticks, order book data, etc.

If this sounds like an application you’re developing, stop by the Timescale booth and tell us about it—in this demo, Timescale’s developer advocate Attila Toth will show you how you can use Timescale to build a real-time dashboard in Grafana. You’ll learn how to use OHLC hyperfunctions, continuous aggregates, real-time aggregates, and the time_bucket function to create stunning and speedy visualizations.

Timescale for energy

Energy data is also time-series data. Energy is another big use case for Timescale, but not everything revolves around large company projects: you can use Timescale for your personal projects too!  

Are you planning to take on your own energy project and need some inspiration? For example, would you like to understand better your energy consumption when installing solar panels? Timescale’s developer advocate, Chris Engelbert, has done precisely that using TimescaleDB. In this demo, Chris will share how he used a Grafana dashboard to track real-time consumption data from his house, all powered by Timescale.

Timescale for observability

Promscale is a unified storage backend for metrics and tracing data with full Prometheus, Jaeger (we’re Jaeger certified), and OpenTelemetry support. In this demo, developer advocate Mathis Van Eetvelde will walk you through monitoring, visualizing, and better understanding your distributed applications using Promscale.

This is a simple, accurate, and solid way to understand your systems like never before and really check what’s going on under the hood, with the added benefits of flexible storage, such as configurable downsampling and retention policies (including per-metric retention), data backfilling, and deletion.

We start the demo with an overview of our individual service and operation-level statistics, as well as RED (Request, Error, Duration) metrics using nothing but elegant SQL queries (Have we told you that Promscale offers complete PromQL and SQL compliance?).

Additionally—because new data visualizations are never enough—we will use Grafana to visualize down and upstream dependency graphs for our individual operations.

Database monitoring

Speaking of using Timescale for looking at systems in real-time: what about showing you how we use Timescale and Grafana to monitor our dev environment? In this demo, Kirk Roybal will share a dashboard monitoring database activity with panels that monitor CPU, network, disk, and memory usage.

Time-series data powers all this information: Timescale’s blazing-fast speed allows us to immediately find and respond to issues in real time, like outages, bad-performing queries, regressions in the code, and much more.

Data tiering to object store

Just a couple of weeks ago, we announced a very exciting functionality in Timescale: our database now includes an object storage layer built on Amazon S3. By running a simple SQL command, you can transparently tier data to the object store for infinite, cost-effective scalability in Timescale. You will pay only for what you store, with no extra charge per query and a baseline price that’s 10x cheaper than our regular storage.

As if that wasn’t enough, we’re incredibly proud of the seamless experience it offers developers. This object store is an integral part of Timescale, meaning that you will still interact with a regular PostgreSQL table (or at least, it will feel like it) and query your data with standard SQL, even after it is moved to the object store. If you want to see it in action, stop by our booth! We’ll be happy to share more about this new feature and show you how it works live.

P.S. This functionality is also accessible via our private beta. If you want to try it at home, sign up to Timescale (free for 30 days, no credit card required) and navigate to Operations > Data Tiering. Click on the “Request Access” button, and we’ll be in touch soon with the next steps.

More Options for Time-Series Developers

In an event that’s built around the AWS ecosystem, we expect to find many developers working with heavy data workloads that may have tried other alternatives, such as Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. If you’re curious about how Timescale compares to RDS, start by reading our latest benchmark.

Timescale runs on AWS, offering hosted PostgreSQL with added time-series superpowers. A transition from RDS would surely be swift, but we’re also happy to discuss other challenges you may be facing with your database (be it RDS or others) and help you find the optimal solution for your time-series projects.

See You There!

AWS re:Invent is one of the sector’s most prominent events, and we’ve put in a lot of time and effort preparing helpful resources to help its attendees perfect their time-series mastery. From demos to swag to a friendly technical team excited to answer all your questions, we have you covered.

And in the meantime, if you want to learn how to do more on AWS using Timescale, check out this blog post—it’s full of hands-on tutorials, blog posts, and videos so you can build time-series applications faster.

So that’s it! Now you know what we have in store at re:Invent. Don’t forget to drop by booth 452 at The Venetian and say “hi” to the team—we’ll be ecstatic to see you there! 👋