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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to research if a dedicated TSDB is worth it for my project. Not to waste time could you recommend one that in your opinion would be worth it over just Postgres? I used InfluxDB a couple of years a ago but didn't really see the value, even though I loved the product. Should I give it another chance?

Application is storage of a diverse set of (irregular) events. Lifecycle management and archival is more important than compression. Volume is moderate.

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I'll spare you my rant on why I don't like InfluxDB lol.

In the end it depends how much data you're dealing with. If you're only ingesting dozens to hundreds of records per second per writer you might actually like AWS Time stream. If you're dealing with a million + rows per second from a low number of writers (e.g. scientific data) then you probably want Influx or Timescale. If you want to host it yourself and you have less than 1TB of data then Influx is okay or if you want it cloud hosted then Influx may be a good option.

If you need full control, scalable, TB or PB of data, etc. Then Timescale is great but it's definitely more work.

Thanks s lot, that is a really helpful reply. I'm curious on your concerns about InfluxDB. I mean not to bash them, but it really comes down to trade-offs and it's always good to know the things they don't emphasize in their marketing.

We used standard Postgres for 200k rows/day (100M rows/year) time series. Worked just fine, even without partitioning. Maybe use partitioning (on time) from the start though, it was a bit tedious to migrate to it later. Now handling 10x these rates, probably good for another 10-100x. We have TimeScaleDB extension enabled now, but not using that many of the features yet, mostly stock Postgres.

There is no need for specialized time-series databases, because normal OLAP databases work better for time-series. I see it from my experience with ClickHouse.

It might sound paradoxical, but specialized time-series databases, such as TimescaleDB or InfluxDB, are not good at time-series, compared to normal (boring) OLAP databases.

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