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So that means that only hyperfunctions can operate on these "hypertables"?

No you can use the ordinary SQL snippets listed in the blog post to do the same thing that a hyperfunction does (altough the hyperfunction might have a better performance). A hyperfunction is a function optimized to work on Timescale hypertables (which can be used to store & query time series data in a Postgres database).

NB: I'm the author of the post, and I work at Timescale.

Yep! Though I will say a number of the hyperfunctions are optimized to work on time-series data whether or not there's a hypertable involved, but the name is meant to echo the hypertable concept. In general, hyperfunctions are meant to improve the user experience for working with time-series data inside of SQL.

So there's no strict semantic connection between the "hyper-" in "hyperfunction" and "hyper-" in "hypertable"? Sounds quite confusing to me.

Technically, the hyper in hypertable was originally connected to the fact that they hypercubes as part of the partitioning logic: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/master/src/hyp... Over time, that connection sort of got lost in favor of hypertables just being useful for storing and analyzing time-series data. So, these functions are conceptually similar in that they make analyzing time-series data easier, even if they don't involve hypercubes or the like. And I'd bet that most users will use hyperfunctions on their data in hypertables, but you can also use them on data in regular Postgres tables etc.

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