That's a great catch @xdanger and you're right, my comment wasn't accurate. Honestly I rewrote the response a few times and this part wasn't cleaned up which is totally on me.
The overall concept that I was intending to highlight is that you can benefit from both row & columnar store in TimescaleDB. Chunks that are not yet compressed (row store data) can be modified (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) as usual and it's transactional - so you're assured it's been completed.
As of TimescaleDB 2.3, compressed chunks (columnar) do allow INSERTS but UPDATES/DELETES on compressed chunks are not yet supported natively. You _can_ decompress any chunk and modify the data (again, transactionally) as needed and recompress.
The overall concept that I was intending to highlight is that you can benefit from both row & columnar store in TimescaleDB. Chunks that are not yet compressed (row store data) can be modified (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) as usual and it's transactional - so you're assured it's been completed.
As of TimescaleDB 2.3, compressed chunks (columnar) do allow INSERTS but UPDATES/DELETES on compressed chunks are not yet supported natively. You _can_ decompress any chunk and modify the data (again, transactionally) as needed and recompress.