Customer Story

SolarNetwork

SolarNetwork Foundation is a New Zealand-registered charity organization that helps individuals and organizations track their energy usage to support renewable energy uptake and resource conservation. They provide infrastructure service that allows developers and application integrators to use and surface the energy data SolarNetwork collects as they create applications for various audiences and scenarios. They add around three million different metrics each day from 3,500+ sources.

SolarNetwork used PostgreSQL as its database and benefited from its extension ecosystem. Timescale appealed to them because it provided a better way to manage table partitioning and adapt it over time as their usage grew. They also evaluated other tools like Cassandra, Druid, and CockroachDB—but none seemed like a perfect fit, mainly since they already used PostgreSQL.

Many tools require quite a significant initial investment in deployment resources that were cost-prohibitive for SolarNework, a charity organization. Timescale allowed them to work with their existing infrastructure and grow as needed. They can still run Timescale on a single primary machine and a secondary replica for most queries.