[manigandham]

Timescale, for all their wonderful marketing, is just an automatic sharding extension for PostgreSQL. You can accomplish the same yourself using native partitioning, or pg_partman, or Citus.

Partitions are a basic building block for scaling performance and storage so it helps when you have lots of data, but Postgres w/Timescale does not have column-oriented storage and is still single-node only so it comes nowhere near the capabilities of cutting-edge columnstores like Clickhouse, KDB+, MemSQL, Kinetica, etc.

[coder543]

> Timescale, for all their wonderful marketing, is just an automatic sharding extension for Postgres database. You can accomplish the same yourself using native partitioning, or pg_partman, or Citus or any number of other tools.

Put another way...

"Postgres, for all their wonderful marketing, is just an automatic data organization system for <underlying filesystem>. You can accomplish the same yourself using open, read, write, or any number of other syscalls."

You're doing the whole "large simplification" thing again. Yes, you can do everything yourself. No, you don't want to do that. Postgres by itself is not great for time-series data. Time series databases are useful, as your reply even showed, except for the part where you seem to assume any software that doesn't do something entirely novel is simply a quick abstraction that you could just whip up yourself.

Column stores have advantages over row stores, but they also have disadvantages. Your statement that it "comes nowhere [close to] the capabilities of cutting-edge column stores [...]" could just as easily be reversed as well.

[manigandham]

Not really what I was saying at all.

Timescale adds automatic partitioning to Postgres, a single-node rowstore relational database. This will naturally give you better performance for larger data (whether time-series or not).

This will not approach the performance and scalability of a fully distributed relational column-oriented database like Clickhouse or MemSQL, because automatic partitioning is just one of many techniques they use for fast performance. There is nothing a special TSDB, or TSDB extension, can do that these database cannot already do faster, while providing rich SQL and joins.