Customer Story

Newtrax

Newtrax believes the future of mining is underground, not only because metals and minerals close to the surface are increasingly rare but because underground mines have a significantly lower environmental footprint. They eliminate the current digital divide between surface and underground mines by integrating the latest IoT and analytics technologies to monitor and provide real-time insights into underground operations, including people, machines, and the environment. Newtrax customers are the largest producers of metals in the world who rely on Newtrax's systems to save lives, reduce maintenance costs, and increase productivity.

Newtrax has been using PostgreSQL since version 8.4. For the past 10 years, they have accumulated considerable experience with this world-class open-source relational database management system. While they are incredibly familiar with the database engine itself and its rich extension ecosystem, partitioning data-heavy tables was never really an option, and third-party solutions didn’t meet all of their needs.

Timescale features, like continuous aggregates and hyperfunctions, saved Newtrax months of development time which is equally, if not more important, than performance gains. Built-in functions, time bucket gapfill and locf, reduced Newtrax's tech debt, allowing them to dynamically interpolate telemetry data points that could be temporarily or permanently missing.