Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

It would be awesome to combine the following things:

* PostGIS

* Timescale

* Citus

* Zedstore

This truly would be the relational DB to end all relational DBs. Unfortunately, we run into a couple problems:

* Managing multiple extensions is a burdensome task, which should be in the wheelhouse of cloud providers, but...

* Timescale and Citus are are open core, holding back features for customers. Their primary revenue channels are their cloud offerings. Unfortunately you can't get Citus and Timescale in the same cloud offering, cause you're dealing with two separate companies.

* PostGIS has multiple cloud providers, but none of them have Timescale or Citus available.

* Citus only has cloud offerings on Azure, excluding the other two major players that often have exclusive relationships with companies.

* Zedstore is really cool and together with Citus could be a massive gamechanger by having columnstore and rowstores in the same distributed database. However, development has stalled, and nobody seems to be able to explain what happened.

Sigh...maybe 5 years from now.

> Timescale and Citus are are open core, holding back features for customers.

One clarification. While TimescaleDB is open-core, our community version is source-available and 100% free to use. We do not "hold back features for customers". You do not need to pay to use any of TimescaleDB's best features, it's all free via the Timescale Community license.

You only pay if you'd like to use our hosted offerings (and save the hassle of self-managing your DB): Timescale Cloud or Managed Service for TimescaleDB.

For more see: https://www.timescale.com/products

(Disclaimer: I work at Timescale)

Timescale Cloud indeed comes with PostGIS installed by default.

Regarding distributed (Citus) and columnar (Zedstore):

- TimescaleDB's compression actually takes a columnar approach (including that it only reads the individual compressed columns that you SELECT), and so combines both row- and column-oriented data. [0]

- TimescaleDB 2.0 also supports distributed deployment, and Timescale Cloud will (very soon) offer one-click deployment of fully-managed multi-node TimescaleDB. [1]

[0] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compressio...

[1] https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-a-distributed-time-...

If you use Aiven for a cloud PG instance you can do both Timescale + PostGIS installed.

I also really wish ClickHouse would prioritize PostGIS support - IIRC it has been on their roadmap for a while but keeps getting kicked around every year or so. Same thing with CockroachDB - PostGIS support kicked down the road every year.

Hi there, CockroachDB dev here. We've supported spatial features from PostGIS since 20.2 - you can get started here https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/spatial-data.html! Of course, there's bits and pieces we've missed but if there's something you're missing in particular you can let me know here or through a GitHub issue.

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