Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL

Re:Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL by akulkarni on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:55PM (#14039028)

From personal experience, not sure I'd agree with that statement. SQL may be limiting for some time-series use cases, but for others it's quite rich and powerful. I won't pretend that SQL solves everyone's time-series problems, but we've found that it goes pretty far.

That said, we may have to get a little creative to support some specific use cases (e.g., bitemporal modeling). Still TBD.

Also, I agree that SQL isn't for everyone (the popularity of PromQL is evidence to that). But a lot of people have been using SQL for a while (personally, since 1999), and there is a rich ecosystem (clients, tools, visualization tools, etc) built around it.

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Re:Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL by jnordwick on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @01:49PM (#14044005)

It most definitely is.. LEAD and LAG are about all you get, and they are painfully slow. SQL was made to be order agnostic, and attempts to make it most order-aware don't quite work. A good time series database is build on table order and lets you exploit it. SQL is abysmal for any time series work.

And temporal and bitemporal databases (despite the name) are orthogonal to the aggregation and windowing issues that make time series difficult in SQL or a row-oriented database. The are just a couple of timestamps and where clauses to support point-in-time queries.

Maybe this is why so many time series databases fail. People making them often don't seem to fundamentally understand the issues, Very few, such as Kx and KDB, seem to understand them.

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