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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I've been very confused by the timeseries branding - I had always thought timescale was purely about adding time series features to PostgreSQL. I didn't know the extension had other applications.

Looks like you've expanded into vector indexing - https://github.com/timescale/pgvectorscale - and an extension which bakes RAG patterns (including running prompts from SQL queries) into PostgreSQL: https://github.com/timescale/pgai

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That's interesting. Our first extension (TimescaleDB) is great for time-series and real-time analytics.

And yes you are correct, pgvectorscale scales pgvector for embeddings, and pgai includes dev experience niceties for AI (eg automatic embedding management).

Would love to hear any suggestions on how we could make this less confusing. :-)

The name of the company is timescale. That’s what’s confusing.

People form initial impressions of a company and what they do, then file those away in their heads and it can be hard to get them to expand their mental model later on.

I guess that's why we have marketing teams!

Honestly, before I joined timescale I had the same impression. Since then I learned that a bunch of the improvements timescale brings (continuous aggregates, hybrid row/column storage and automatic partitioning) are much more widely useful than just IOT sensor data. There is definitely some room for improvement just in communication there.

Ajay already commented, that he's open to new ideas on how to frame timescale. I for myself always thought of postgres as the best jack of all trades database. It's basically the best db if you don't 100% know what's the best choice yet. Timescale expands on that and enhances postgres's capabilities even further so that use-cases which would usually call for a second storage option (e.g. analytics, vector) end up working great with just postgres itself.

I'd personally love if we also had a full-text offering akin to paradedb/pg_search so noone would ever need to host elasticsearch again. But it also doesn't make sense to spread the valuable postgres expert resources too thin.

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