Timescale Newsletter Roundup: November 2021

Welcome to another Timescale Newsletter! This edition comes filled with video content goodness. 📺  Adjust your headphones, grab a snack, and get ready!

We’re super excited to present you (dramatic pause 🥁)... Timescale weekly Twitch shows! 🥳  Catch our live streams on three times a week – hosting shows every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday!

• #TimescaleTuesday show focuses on all things TimescaleDB - meet our Developer Advocates at 12pm ET and become a time-series expert.
• On Wednesdays at 10am ET, it’s time to talk crypto and finance 🔥 with Attila Toth on The Stocks and Crypto SQL Show.
• On Thursdays, join Miranda Auhl and David Kohn on The Linear Tig(e)ression Show 🐯 a weekly show talking about all things data analysis every Monday at 2pm ET!

We can’t wait to see you there and answer any questions you may have, chat about anything you’d like to know and keep learning together! And in case you can’t make the live streams, we’ll be uploading every episode to Youtube.

Apart from introducing you to our Twitch shows, in this newsletter, we tell you about the latest blog by Ryan Booz (in which he teaches you how to generate more realistic time-series datasets for your testing 🔥), we share with you a video showcasing how to analyze OpenTelemetry traces with Promscale by Timescale observability engineer Vineeth Pothulapati, we also give you an overview of the upcoming events we’ll be participating in… and much more!

In Timescale, we’re all getting ready to embrace the holiday spirit - especially our US team members! Actually, we already warmed up by celebrating Halloween together.  🎉

But it hasn’t been only partying over here. In the last month, we’ve had some very exciting announcements 🚀 including additional regions for Timescale Cloud in North America and Europe;  TimescaleDB 2.5 (featuring continuous aggregates for distributed hypertables, time zones for time_bucket_ng, and the support for PostgreSQL14); our first NFT Starter Kit; and the easy, transparent, and production ready support for multi-node services in Timescale Cloud.

On top of it, on October 28th we hosted our first (but not last) Timescale Community Day, a +3hr stream full of chatter about databases, Postgres, TimescaleDB, and time-series data! A huge thank you to all the speakers, and of course, to the attendees. It was a pleasure to have you. If you missed it, you have the complete recording on YouTube.

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).

Product updates & announcements

Announcing new regions for Timescale Cloud, now available in North America and Europe

🌍 Now, users can select the AWS region of their choice when deploying their service, choosing between us-east-1 (N. Virginia), us-west-2 (Oregon), and eu-west-1 (Ireland).

• 💰 Have pricing questions? Check out our pricing calculator (scroll all the way down!).
• ☁️ Get started with Timescale Cloud for free.
• 🐥 See the Twitter thread for the highlights.

One-click multi-node TimescaleDB: announcing the support for multi-node deployments in Timescale Cloud

Now, you can deploy and configure multi-node services in Timescale Cloud in seconds directly from the UI, as well as monitor and interact with your multi-node cluster as if it was a single-node service. Multi-node Timescale Cloud has you covered for the most demanding time-series workloads 📈 giving you a boost in ingest and query speeds.

• 📚 Read the blog post for more insights on the improved performance you can get with multi-node.
• 📺 Watch this short demo video for a walkthrough on how to deploy, configure, and query your first multi-node cluster.
• 🐥 See the Twitter thread for the highlights.

Massive scale for time-series workloads: Introducing continuous aggregates for distributed hypertables in TimescaleDB 2.5

Say hi to TimescaleDB 2.5! 👋 Good news for multi-node users: this version comes with the support for continuous aggregates on distributed hypertables. It also includes a much-requested feature:  timezones in time_buket_ng 👏. We are also very proud to share that TimescaleDB 2.5 supports PostgreSQL 14, only one month after its general release! 🐘

• 📚 Read the blog post to learn more about distributed hypertables, continuous aggregates, and how they work together.
• 💻 Check out our docs for instructions on how to upgrade.
• 🐥 See the Twitter thread for the highlights.

A different and (often) better way to downsample your Prometheus metrics

Today, we’re excited to introduce a better option for downsampling Prometheus metrics, enabling developers to do accurate and flexible trend analysis on those metrics over long periods of time with high performance and reduced storage costs.

• 📚 Read the blog post.
• 🐥 See the Twitter thread for the highlights.

New technical content, videos & tutorials

Analyze millions of NFT sales on OpenSea using PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB

We’re so excited to introduce our first Timescale NFT Starter Kit, a step-by-step guide to get up and running with collecting, storing, analyzing and visualizing NFT data from the world’s largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea! And it comes with our very own first NFT Collection: the Time Travel Tigers! Join our mascot Eon 🐯 as they travel through time to teach the world about time-series data, wearing weird and wacky disguises to blend in with the crowd!

• 📚 Read the blog post.
• 📈 Get up and running analyzing NFT trends with the NFT Starter Kit tutorial.
• 🧰 Download the NFT Starter Kit on GitHub.
• 🐯 Check out the Time Travel Tigers NFT Collection on OpenSea.
• 📺 Watch our demo videos to learn how to visualize your NFT data using our pre-built dashboards in Apache Superset and Grafana.
• 🐥 See the Twitter thread for the highlights.

Replay talks from Timescale Community Day

The Timescale Community Day was a blast. 🎉 You can rewatch all sessions on the TimescaleDB YouTube channel. We want to give a big shout-out to all speakers and to the event who made this event possible. 🙏

Metrics and traces with TimescaleDB

Watch Timescale observability engineer Vineeth Pothulapati chat with Saiyam Pathak about how to leverage the TimescaleDB superpowers for observability data! Concretely, you will learn how you can use Promscale, the observability backend powered by SQL, to store and analyze OpenTelemetry traces - including a demo showing the advantages of analyzing traces with SQL.

Linear Tig(e)ression Hyperfunctions spotlight - counter_agg()

Timescale Engineer, David Kohn, and Developer Advocate Miranda Auhl teach us about the counter_agg() hyperfunction! In this video, David covers the what, why, and how about counter_agg() and shows us how to use it in action!

Linear Tig(e)ression Data analytics - evaluation techniques in TimescaleDB

This session includes basic SQL, PostgreSQL, and TimescaleDB functionality, so if you are a beginner, this session is for you! Some fun tricks are included for experienced users as well.

#TimescaleTuesday Common questions with continuous aggregates

In this episode, Ryan Booz and Attila Toth discuss continuous aggregates, addressing questions about refresh policies, common misunderstandings about bucket sizes, and how real-time aggregates work.

#TimescaleTuesday TimescaleDB compression 101

In this #TimescaleTuesday live stream, Timescale Developer Advocate Ryan Booz covers the fundamentals of compression in TimescaleDB. Learn about compression to understand how it works before you begin using it.

Stocks & Crypto SQL show Designing an NFT events database schema

In the first episode of the Stocks & Crypto SQL Show, Timescale developer advocate Attila Toth shows how to design a schema for NFT transactions and demonstrates how to fetch and insert NFT events data into TimescaleDB using the NFT Starter Kit.

Stocks & Crypto SQL show Analyzing NFT transactions with TimescaleDB

Take a deep dive into the world of NFT’s using hyperfunctions and other TimescaleDB specific functionality with Timescale Developer Advocate Attila Toth.

New #remote-friendly events & community

Find us at PGConf NYC 2021 (December 2-3)

We’re proud to have been a platinum sponsor of PGConf NYC 2021! And don’t miss the talks by the Timescale team members Ryan Booz and David Kohn ✨

• 🗓 Attend Ryan’s session to learn how to manage changes and migrations in PostgreSQL with ease, giving advice based on this experience.
• 🗓 Attend David’s session to learn about the design of PostgreSQL aggregation, explaining how everything works under the hood and how it inspired the design of our own TimescaleDB hyperfunctions.
  

Timescale virtual monthly Office Hours (December 7)

If you haven’t joined our monthly sessions yet, now’s your chance! Our Office Hours are always different - with topics ranging from best ways to integrate with third-party tools, to musings on open-source technology - but they’re always chock-full of expert advice, community projects, and fun!

• 🗓 Reserve your spot for the upcoming session.
• 💬 If you can’t join but have a question, reach out to our engineering team on Slack.

TimescaleDB tips, reading list & more

Keeping time with TimescaleDB: understanding and integrating time-series data with Ruby on Rails  - Community post

Big shout out to Misha Merkushin from Evil Martian for putting together this awesome blog post! In this blog, Misha addresses a timely issue: how to work efficiently and effectively with time-series data and Ruby on Rails. His solution? TimescaleDB! In his blog post, Misha gives you a rundown on time-series data, teaching you how to set up TimescaleDB in your Rails projects.

Generating more realistic sample time-series data with PostgreSQL generate_series()

This is the second post of our three-part series on how to generate realistic sample time-series data. 🔥 Learn how you can use a built-in PostgreSQL function, generate_series(), to create large, high-quality time-series datasets - for evaluating new features in PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB, to help with your testing, or just to create fun data samples!

• 👉Read part 1 and part 2 of the blog series.
• 📺 Watch a demo video to see some of the examples in action.

One-click multi-node TimescaleDB: announcing the support for multi-node deployments in Timescale Cloud

Timescale Cloud now supports the fast and easy creation of multi-node deployment 🤩 enabling developers to easily scale the most demanding time-series workloads! Have you experimented with multi-node yet?

• 👋 Remember that you can set up a free trial that will give you free access to Timescale Cloud for 30 days, no credit card required, and no spam sent!

What is ClickHouse, how does it compare to PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB, and how does it perform for time-series data?

An in-depth look at how ClickHouse and TimescaleDB architectures impact application design, developer experience, and performance - with detailed benchmark results comparing ingest speeds, disk space, and query response times.

• 📚 Read the blog post.
• 🐥 See the Twitter thread for the highlights.

Tweets of the month 🏆