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Comment by ironman1478 | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. In certain industries (manufacturing, energy, etc) there are companies (really 1 company) that essentially have monopolies on time series databases / historians. There has been 0 competition in that space and as a result the databases and surrounding client tools are just so awful. It'll be interesting to see if timescaledb can really enter that market and force those companies to adapt.

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We actually see a bunch of startups directly going after that market leader in historian space that are building on _top_ of TimescaleDB.

So they can bring their domain expertise in process manufacturing and elsewhere, and then build on a modern, powerful platform. We're excited to see this!

That's awesome. Y'all are going to crush it, especially since I saw that lots of companies have an appetite for adopting new backends, especially dbs that can work in both on-prem & in cloud.

We too are also doing something similar. We've just started the move to timescale for real-time energy and sensor data from industrial assets. We have a single customer with about 10TB of data and growing from 2 years worth of real-time monitoring which is stored in a mixture of table storage and SQL. Timescale on PG seems like blessing for our future plans :)

I would love to known of some alternatives to Rockwell, wonder ware, Schneider to propose to our customers. What startups are building on top of timescale?

Well...not a startup, but Schneider's latest-gen EcoStruxure platform is based on TimescaleDB =)

https://ecostruxure-building-help.se.com/bms/Topics/show.cas...

But feel free to hit me up at mike@timescale or mike on slack.timescale.com.

What company is that?

KDB in finance?

I was employed there so I don't feel entirely comfortable stating their name. Just google around for "operational historian". It was really frustrating because we had these ideas years ago (and many other ideas), but due to reasons we were not allowed to actually make the product genuinely better. Also, the product is in more places than you'd think because they partner with vendors to sell the database as a component in a larger system that the vendor packages up and sells.

I suspect AVEVA PI (formerly OSIsoft) is what they are referring to. PI is excessively popular in Enterprise scenarios either OT or IT.

He's probably referring to OSIsoft's PI historian.

Their stuff is a nightmare to use, and is insanely expensive.

Always nice when we get to just swap it out for something like Canary or even Ignition although folks are always trying to trash the Ignition Historian when it works well for most use cases people need to solve.

Yeah, Ignition’s historian isn’t meant to replace or compete with PI, it’s just meant to provide a basic historian that meets the average user’s needs.

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