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Comment by PaulWaldman | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on what scaling issues you had with Timescale?

I ran into issues with TS too. Main issue I recall now was maintaining a grand total count of events that were already rolled up into daily counts was not fast since it always looked back at all the data. There was no way in the ts patterns to efficiently express it without handrolling something. The issue was that a grand total count can’t be expressed in terms of a hypertable because there’s no time column.

It’s fantastic for workloads that neatly fit in the hypertable pattern though.

You tried to use a timeseries database without a time column?

> Don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you expecting a real answer of how I was hoping timescale's internal watermark system would help me roll up a total count or are you just implying I'm an idiot?

What's the difference between the watermark and a time column? Not the person you were replying to but I'm curious since I also thought that TimeseriesDB had a similar "timestamp" to influx.

TS requires you to specify a time column in each hypertable or view (continuous aggregate) where you want it to work its magic. It then stores an internal watermark that it compares to the time column in the table to figure out from where to read when refreshing.

My issue was that for a grand total I didn’t have a time column, so I couldn’t define my query as a continuous aggregate and the query had to start counting from the start of my underlying series each time.

Perhaps: add a time column with an artificially huge time range? This defines the grand total as an interval sum that happens to include all possible intervals.

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