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Timescale Newsletter Roundup: December 2021

Timescale Newsletter Roundup: December 2021

In this very festive edition, we’re giving you an overview of our annual #12daysofTimescale ✨ a countdown of our favorite content items published in 2021. This has been an amazing year for Team Timescale - it was not easy to choose what to include! You will find a little bit of everything on that list, including pieces on data analysis, observability, crypto, and PostgreSQL.

Following the holiday’s spirit, we brought you a (very cloudy) present: two new features in Timescale Cloud  ☁️🎁, Promscale 0.7 new release, latest episodes from our Timescale Twitch Shows 📺, a new Developer Q&A, and a list of events we participated in.

We’re always releasing new features, creating new documentation and tutorials, and hosting virtual sessions to help developers do amazing things with their data. And, to make it easy for our community members to discover and get the resources they need to power their projects, teams, or business with analytics, we round up our favorite new pieces in our biweekly newsletter.

We’re on a mission to teach the world about time-series data, supporting and growing communities around the world. And, sharing educational resources as broadly as possible is one way to do just that :).

Here’s a snapshot of the content we shared with our readers this month (subscribe to get updates straight to your inbox).

Happy Holidays from Team Timescale – now, let’s dig in!

Product updates & announcements

TimescaleDB 2.5.1

We just released TimescaleDB 2.5.1, a patch fix containing multiple bug fixes - many of them improving the usability of distributed hypertables.

Promscale 0.7.0

We released a new version of Promscale. This release includes performance improvements in our OpenTelemetry tracing support, the introduction of a new feature flat to enable beta functionality, Helm chart improvements, and support for PostgreSQL 14.

Introducing one-click database forking in Timescale Cloud

You can now create a copy of your Timescale Cloud service in one click! 🚀 We are very excited about this feature, as it will allow you to perform a variety of important tasks in your workflow in less time and with more flexibility.

Announcing VPC peering for all regions

VPC peering (now available in all Timescale Cloud regions) allows you to access your Timescale Cloud services from your existing AWS cloud infrastructure, without ever exposing your services to the public internet - ensuring maximum safety and privacy. Plus, in Timescale Cloud you can create multiple VPCs per service, meaning that you could use them in more advanced deployments.

New technical content, videos & tutorials

Linear Tig(e)ression with Miranda Auhl and David Kohn

📺 Window functions

Window functions are a powerful SQL feature - but not the most intuitive! Check out the latest Linear Tig(e)ression episode to improve your windows functions game 🙌. Get a walkthrough of how windows functions work, with practical examples!

📺 Hyperfunctions spotlight - counter_agg()

In this episode, David and Miranda tell us all about the counter_agg() hyperfunction! They teach us what counter_agg() is and why you should use it for your statistical analysis 💡 giving you insights on how to do so!

📺 Data analytics - evaluation techniques in TimescaleDB

Are you a beginner in relational databases? This is the episode for you! In this session, Miranda and David cover basic SQL, PostgreSQL, and TimescaleDB functionality - teaching how we can use these tools for data evaluation (they share some more experienced tricks as well).

#TimescaleTuesday with Ryan Booz

📺 TimescaleDB compression deep dive (continued)

Are you curious about TimescaleDB compression? 🤔 Perhaps you are already using it, but you still have doubts about how it really works? Watch Ryan’s hands-on, practical explanation on how to use TimesaleDB’s compression on all its potential.


The Stocks & Crypto SQL Show with Attila Toth

📺 Build fast dashboards with TimescaleDB (+ reduce storage costs)

In this episode, Timescale Developer Advocate Attila Toth shows us how to use continuous aggregates to speed up your dashboards in Apache Superset - also talking about how you can reduce your data size through the use of compression!

📺 Designing a database schema for financial market data

Jônatas and Attila discuss schema design in this episode, talking about the most important aspects to consider in order to build an optimal schema for storing financial market data 📈.

📺 Downsampling time-series data

📺 Analyzing stock prices with TimescaleDB's time_bucket() function

New #remote-friendly events & community

Linux.conf.au.2022 (January 14-16, 2022)

Timescale Documentation Manager and rockstar Technical Writer Lana Brindley will be talking at Linux.conf.au. She will be speaking on how you can assess (and improve!) your current information architecture, making your docs as clear, discoverable, and valuable as possible.

Timescale virtual monthly Office Hours (February 1, 2022)

If you haven’t joined our monthly sessions yet, now is your chance! Office Hours are always different, with topics ranging from best ways to integrate with third-party tools, to musings on open-source technology.

TimescaleDB tips, reading list & more

PostgreSQL vs Python for data cleaning: A guide

Data cleaning is extremely important to the data analysis process. Get an overview of data cleaning techniques that you can use directly in your TimescaleDB or PostgreSQL database.

AWS Lambda for beginners: overcoming the most common challenges

To celebrate AWS:reInvent, we’re sharing some of our favorite TimescaleDB + AWS blog posts 🥳. For example, check out this blog on AWS Lambda for beginners - in which Attila Toth gives you advice on how to overcome the most common obstacles when starting with Lambda.

How to build a weather station with Elixir, Nerves, and TimescaleDB - Developer Q&A - Alex Koutmous

Get a sneak peek of the IoT weather station solution that Alex, Bruce, and Frank used as a real-live example in their book that guides readers through the process of building an end-to-end IoT solution for capturing, persisting, and visualizing data with Nerves, Elixir, Grafana, and TimescaleDB.

Using TimescaleDB with PGO, the open source Postgres Operator - Crunchy Data

Our friends at Crunchy Data wrote up this how-to on deploying TimescaleDB on Kubernetes with PGO. These instructional posts with code samples are always popular. A useful ten-minute read.

Why we chose TimescaleDB over InfluxDB - United Manufacturing Hub

“TimescaleDB is better suited for the Industrial IoT than InfluxDB, because it is stable, mature, and failure resistant, it uses the very common SQL as a query language and you need a relational database for manufacturing anyway.”

Save time with our PostgreSQL cheatsheet

We’ve rounded up essential psql commands in one easy-to-navigate place, so can you spend more time querying your data - not trying to remember that command that always escapes you! 🕺🏽 Click, copy, done. ✅

13 tips to improve PostgreSQL Insert performance

An oldie but goldie! 🥇 In this blog post, Mike Freedman (Timescale CTO and co-founder) shares his best advice to speed up PostgreSQL ingest rates - talking about how you can test and optimize disk performance using parallel writes, batch inserts, and more.

Wrapping Up

And, lastly, if you know someone who'd like to join our team – or learn more about life on Team Timescale 🐯 – we're currently hiring across all teams (and 100% remote). Check out our careers page to view all of our open positions.

Thanks!

The Timescale Team

📆 To see past issues of this newsletter, check out our archives.

The open-source relational database for time-series and analytics.
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