Timescale Is Now TigerData | Hacker News Reader

Timescale Is Now TigerData

tigerdata.com

170 pointspbowyer133 comments

> There are no more “SQL vs. NoSQL” debates. MongoDB, Cassandra, InfluxDB, and other NoSQL databases are seen as technical dead ends. Snowflake and Databricks are acquiring PostgreSQL companies. No one talks about Hadoop. The Lakehouse has won.

That's quite some statement. Boy, would I have loved to live in a world where marketing rhetoric and scientific opinion were easier to distinguish.

Cassandra definitely isn’t dead, anyway. InfluxDB is a competitor to Timescale / TigerData, so that’s just a slam on them. I don’t think about MongoDB, other than of course the canonical video [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs

Also linking to an old HN comment to gloat about how wrong the doubters were is not a good look.

There's an element of immaturity in the style that they should probably work on.

I concur, the tone is very off-putting.

Yeah they might be good but the marketing is really bold and, to a certain extent, arrogant if not outright disgusting.

It sounds totally illogical comment, all those technologies mentioned have only been growing in the last few years and specialised databases are disrupting old school SQL ones.

In a way I guess this makes sense because they are not just doing time series anymore but on the other hand that is just a very strange name. I'm just thinking about Tiger Beetle and I'm sure they will lose so much in brand awareness because people have heard about timescale db but they have not heard about tiger data and the name just sounds so cheesy.

This makes a certain amount of sense because it seems like the actual timescale DB extension/support/etc. they offer is becoming exponentially less important to their company as a result of their pgvectorscale offering. (I'm sure the post says as much.)

I did some work using pgvectorscale and their hosted offering a few months back and the product and the team were a delight to work with. I wish TigerData well.

So there’s TigerData and TigerBeetle. I wish they would have chosen a different fast cat…

I know what you mean, but still Tiger Beetles are an insect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_beetle

I thought about that, but, but it’s not the comparison of the second word, it’s the strength of the first. Read this list:

* Tiger Shark * Tiger Beetle * Tiger Data * Tiger Games * Tiger Woods * Tiger Attack * Tiger Snake * Wild Tiger

Only one stands out as not like the others. Tiger is too strong a word. The second word disappears.

Now they just need to rebrand as Tiger Direct!

Also WiredTiger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiredTiger

WildcatDB, though uses a cheetah for the logo RocksDB uses an I believe tiger for the logo as well. Postgres with the elephant, MariaDB with the seal.

Small corrections: RocksDB's logo is a cheetah. MariaDB's is a sea lion, which is similar to a seal, but is delightfully relevant to this thread due to sounding more cat-like.

Don't forget Tigris https://www.tigrisdata.com/

they even have a similar palette on their website, I could have sworn they were from the same company

I'd like to see more references to biological taxonomies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera

Too bad they weren’t French, or a new breed of Riot Grrl databases. Le Tigre DB rolls off the tongue.

Finally, a database that we can query to determine who took the bomp from the bompalompalomp?

As long as the DB doesn’t show its disco, I think we’ll be OK even without an answer.

We chose the Tiger back in April 2017.

Also TigerBeetle is an insect, not a fast cat.

> We chose the Tiger back in April 2017.

Fair. But a mascot is not a name. I hope you can see why I bring this up?

> Also TigerBeetle is an insect, not a fast cat.

It is? Damn. I thought a Tiger Beetle was a six foot long cat wearing costume wings and a springs for antennae?

And TigerGraph, too!

We've been using TimescaleDB/TigerData for over five years now and it has proven to be a reliable component of our project. We process and store hundreds of data points for a six-digit number of industrial robots and TimescaleDB is what makes that possible. While I can't speak for Timescale Cloud, the managed service for TimescaleDB on Azure has been rock solid.

One annoying thing is that tiered storage is not available on their Azure offering, and also in general it feels like managed service for TimescaleDB is the unloved stepchild of their offering.

But yes, I hope the team continues their amazing work, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the project develops in the future.

@jabiko thanks for the note. Glad our product is working so well for you. re:Azure we are working on some new things :) . Feel free to drop me a message if you'd like to discuss further (ramon@tigerdata.com).

> When we started 8 years ago, SQL databases were “old fashioned.” NoSQL was the future. Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, InfluxDB – these were the new, exciting NoSQL databases. PostgreSQL was old and boring.

In 2017? I thought the NoSQL hype had subsided by then and everyone was excited about distributed transactions -- Spanner, Cockroach, Fauna, Foundation, etc.

I think this just illustrates the tech bubble we live in. Occasionally we find one that doesn't match ours.

Exactly!

"The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson

I had the same thought. They are off by a few years

Marketing is going to market.

  TigerData is bold, fast, and built to power the next era of software.

We already have a Tiger-themed database at home: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle

When I saw the headline I immediately thought that TigerData is somehow related to the TigerBeetle.

My experiences with Timescale revealed the need for a full time DBA expert of TSDB to make the db viable for queries exceeding more than the last week of time series data. Tiered reads barely work at all. Do you want a degree in how to use a crippled Postgres offshoot?

Tbf, my experience as a DBRE has been that most places should have a DB expert on staff, especially for Postgres. I’ve not used TigerData / Timescale, but IME there’s far more complexity to reason about and manage than people think.

Generally developers need to be watched so they don't blow up the application performance and so they reuse queries in the correct manner so you optimize things like the query cache and the indexes you have.

Query optimization is one of those places where it can be easy to get orders of magnitude performance increases.

Agreed, though it’s also a monstrous effort to get devs to stop chucking everything into JSON, or my new favorite hell, serializing entire classes and storing them as a BLOB.

It’s my fervent belief that we should revert to specialized roles, with a DB team designing schema and queries based on a team’s needs, who can access them via API only. Slows down velocity? Yes. Faster queries and more efficient use of resources? Yes. Fewer incidents and better referential integrity? Also yes.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Would love to hear more if you are open to it: ajay [at] tigerdata [dot] com.

TIL you can have GIFs as the `og:image` and Slack and friends will render them as GIFs, actually wild

I recon you mean that the GIF is animated? I tried pasting this with the article URL in Whatsapp (web), but it did not render any animation for me.

Care to elaborate on why you posted this?

They learned something and wanted to share.

Did you try Slack?

> "Our cloud offering is “Tiger Cloud.” Our logo stays the same: the tiger, looking forward, focused and fast. Some things do not change. Our open source time-series PostgreSQL extension remains TimescaleDB. Our vector extension is still pgvectorscale."

Cool!

IMHO, the bigger name conflict is with Tigris Data. Tigris means tiger and despite no tiger logo, they did have tiger stickers at events

> Tigris means tiger

I'm pretty sure Tigris Data is named after the Tigris river (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris), and the name does not mean "tiger".

In French, the river and the animal are both "tigre"

You'd be surprised. Tigris is the latinized version of the name of the river in ancient Greek (τίγρης) which also means tiger in ancient Greek.

The common underlying etymology is an even older into-european term translated roughly as "sharp" or "pointy" (in the case of the tiger I guess referring to the teeth).

From a biblical etymology page:

The name Tigris shares its root with the word "tiger" (more precise: the word "tiger" and the name Tigris are identical in Greek). That means that in deep antiquity the tiger and the Tigris had signature qualities that were comparable and from which both derived their name. The word tiger and the identical name Tigris both come from the Avestan word tighri, which means arrow, or the more general tigra, which means sharp or pointed.

BTW there is another TigerData which predates this rename by a month: https://library.princeton.edu/about/library-news/2025/introd...

The original tiger bit could have originated from some of founders’ affiliations with Princeton too.

Timescale is much better

They should have kept timescale

Age as old as time. My favorite on is Typesafe -> Lightbend -> Akka, and by favorite, most annoying.

Timescale is sooooo much better. What a bad decision.

Slightly off-topic perhaps. For my use case (both short-term and long-term storage of sensors and metrics of a small Home Assistant instance) it probably doesn't matter, but what could someone recommend? ClickHouse looks kind of neat and it doesn't appear to be difficult to admin.

At the company I work at we manage a lot of historical data with Timescale, but we have also had good results with vanilla PostgreSQL for smaller time-series-data-sets. If you are already comfortable with Postgres this might be worth a look.

If you like standard SQL-y type queries, timescaledv itself is a good option. Influx is another option but it has a steeper learning curve and imo it doesn't pay off

Since this is a timescaleDB topic, would timescale not work? (With a basic DB and a few continuous aggregates running in the background?)

I would go with InfluxDB, actually it's powers several Home Assistant apps behind the scene already for a reason.

btw I work at InfluxData and happy to answer any question, just ask here or reach our in our forums

At first I thought they were sold and the new owner didn't like the original name, but it doesn't seem to be the case. I don't really understand, why would somebody change a recognizable brand.

TimescaleDB will continue to be used to refer to the timeseries postgresql extension. One offering from what they consider to be a larger set of offerings.

Because they don’t want to be pigeonholed as “just time series things”. They continue selling a product called timescale, so I don’t think it’s a loss of brand in much measure.

We only care for them to the degree they do "time series things".

Not for AI or other bs "pivots"

pivot from time to ai

Not the case!

Then why reference the "Agentic Era" in the title?

well at least they didn't append "AI" to their name

That was one of our requirements when we started discussing a name change. :-)

Missed opportunity for TaigerData ;-)

:-)

I can't imagine the comments if we had chosen that...

> InfluxDB, and other NoSQL databases are seen as technical dead ends.

Is influxdb really seen as a dead end?

1.x and 2.x are, which is why 3.x reinvents the product around standard tech (true SQL, Apache Arrow). It's hard to ask customers to bet on a database when, to name one reason, its query language has already changed twice.

InfluxDB Founder & CTO here. We worked hard to support InfluxQL in 3.x and it supports the v1 write API. Admittedly, it will be a migration to move and we haven't yet built the tooling, but we felt it was important to get the 3.0 release out even though we don't have the migration tooling built yet. Our plan is to have that available later this year.

The 2.x to 3.x move is, admittedly, much harder. This is because of the language Flux. We haven't been able to bring that over to 3.x in a way that makes it useful. We actually built a bridge for it in our cloud offering, but our experience is that the performance isn't good enough to be acceptable for customers wanting to upgrade. If they want to make the move, adopting SQL or InfluxQL is likely the only path.

We'll continue to develop 3.x and we'll build more migration tooling over time. I think we can build specialized tooling to help Flux users migrate over to 3.x with query translation tools, but there are more features we need to land in 3.x to enable that first.

We're committed to the technology stack (Apache Arrow & DataFusion) and the 3.x line. We have no plans for another major release. I'll be happy if we end up releasing 3.56.2 8 years from now.

I've been burned by influxdb abandoning their old versions one too many times and will never consider it for anything ever again.

Every major release of InfluxDB have been a rewrite.

While 3. looks impressive, it seems like most of the interesting features are closed source, so not a 1:1 replacement for version 1.

InfluxDB Edge is open-source, but you need to depend on InfluxDB Community which is free, but closed source, to get things like include functionality like a compactor, which will add capabilities for deletes and re-organizing files to optimize for queries on longer time ranges.

They also need to resurrect all their old 1.* Client libraries for 3.*.

I love InfluxDB, but I’m not hopeful for its future.

No joke: We've had Influx customers come to us and say that migrating from Influx 1.x to Timescale was easier than migrating from 1.x to 2.x

I use victoriametrics now, seems to be ok

Quite the opposite, InfluxDB 3 is the best time series database currently in the market in terms of features and performance.

(full disclosure, I work at InfluxData so my answer is biased).

I've been using TimescaleDB for a while as a metrics datastore. It's really proven to be great for aggregating data without a lot of hassle (using continuous aggregates, retention policies, etc).

I recommend it when you don't want/need to have separate sources for account data and your metrics/aggregate data.

Whenever I see a news headline mentioning that one of my critical dependencies is undergoing changes that make no technical sense, I get real fear. I feel like Jon Snow facing the army, as if I can see a tidal wave of devops work and code fixes coming my way. I really hope that these infrastructure product teams can be considering and not change something that is working well just for the sake of it. Even if they did a really smooth job, that sense of fear itself is a hurt to the brand - making me feel that this product is a source of fear.

Why not TigerScale ?

Sounds like a skin disease from Game of Thrones

Tigers don't scale.

Tigers are great climbers.

But you can scale a tiger

yet they do data.

Yeah, of course.

Timescale is a much cooler name. Also heres a conversation I just had with Jippity. There are some nicer names imo.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6852de93-1384-8004-ac63-4ae93a8373...

I met these folks one time in NYC, you could tell they were onto something big & bigger.

Thank you for recognizing that in us.

Literally last week I was looking at the logo and was like interesting they didn't go with a name using Tiger, Cheetah, etc. Cool name, though I must say Timescale was really cool name as well.

Most probably their new name TigerData is influenced by their lead investor during Series C funding, Tiger Global Management.

It is just my guess.

So we do have Tiger management, Tiger base, Tiger Systems. Now with Tiger data if they all combine we may have a TigerDBMS.

Which has nothing to do with WiredTiger I guess?

Bad choice imo, given that there is another database called tiger beetle. I assumed they’d merged when I saw the title.

Missed opportunity for the AI pivot: Taiger Data. I'll see myself out.

I talked to the timescale CTO at pg conf a few years ago and asked him what timescale does differently than a standard columnar database that makes it better suited for time oriented data. He said a bunch of things and I said “but columnar databases do those things.” Then he got mad at me.

I guess it’s just another columnar dbms after all?

They don't do well on benchmarks https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/

I'd argue we do okay, but of course it's Clickhouses own benchmark it's hard to outperform them there. It's also not apples to apples. Clickhouse has much less transactional guarantees and isn't postgres SQL compatible. The great thing about Timescale is that you only need one DB for all your analytics and transactional needs. Combined with pgvector postgres also handles search quite well.

In a way Timescale is just postgres on steroids. Sure if you really know your use-case well, are fine with giving up some postgres nicenes, are willing to learn a new query language and are fine with using and syncing multiple data stores you'll outperform timescale. But I think it is still really cool to see how close you can get with essentially just a better postgres.

> Clickhouse has much less transactional guarantees ...

Is this relevant? The benchmark is just reads.

Depends on your workload? If you don't care about ACID compliance in your use-case, and query speed is all that is relevant to you probably not.

You might still be better of with Timescale/TigerData if your query pattern uses a lot of joins as we do much better there than Clickhouse does. We have our own benchmark too and perform better than Clickhouse on those kind of queries: https://rtabench.com/

But also transactions often make your life as a dev easier in my experience, and being able to use a single DB and stick with 100% postgres compatible SQL without having to change your application is often worth more than squeezing out the last few bit of query performance.

I'm just saying that single-benchmark comparisons rarely tell the full story when evaluating database technologies. ClickHouse is undoubtedly impressive engineering, and it excels in many scenarios. Ultimately the optimal choice depends on your specific use case.

I'm glad you answered as my comment was not very complete. It left out mentioning that transactions should not be expensive on reads unless you are doing something wrong. In general MVCC--which PostgreSQL uses--does not have a lot of performance overhead for this case. ClickHouse also maintains snapshots when reading, so to a certain extent they do the same work. Transactions don't seem like a very strong argument here, since you would be conceding that your implementation is inefficient.

I agree with the other points. ClickHouse is not strong on joins [yet]. It's also nice to have a single database for everything. Yet so far nobody has been able to achieve one that delivers high concurrency, fast updates, and petabyte-level scaling. Mike Stonebraker et al. called this problem out in 2007. [0] It appears they called it right and we'll continue to see 2-3 major categories of databases for the foreseeable future.

[0] https://www.vldb.org/conf/2007/papers/industrial/p1150-stone...

It depends on which benchmarks you use.

"ClickBench evaluates databases using a single table of clickstream data, representative of workloads like web analytics, BI, and log aggregation. It also favors full-table large scans and large-scale aggregations on denormalized data.

Real-time analytics inside applications is different and needs a new benchmark." [0]

This is why we published RTABench. [1]

We believe that it is more representative of real-time analytical workloads.

[0] https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/benchmarking-databases-for-re...

[1] https://rtabench.com/

Yes, TigerData aka Timescale tried to make a fuss a few years ago comparing Clickhouse and TimescaleDB, but they failed.

DuckDB seems to be the most interesting there.

It is meant for single reader/writer workload so not meant to be used as a service

Do you think all time series databases (like InfluxDB for example) are useless compared to "columnar databases" that "do those things" or just Timescale?

it does sound like a pretty dumb question. Many things do similar things. That is like asking what postgres does that other sql databases doesnt.

Few years have passed and your guess is still wrong.

Unfair anecdote as you don't mention what he said before and after "he got mad" (whatever that means).

going to be super confusing that there is now tigerdata and tigergraph - both database companies

also WiredTiger, the storage engine used by MongoDB https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger

of course!

Hey I mean I'm not super likely to use both tiger data and tiger graph, but using both tailscale and timescale has resulted in some awkward mixups

Also tigerbeetle!

next: TigerSalamander

how could i forget!

"Why “Tiger”? The tiger has been our mascot since 2017, symbolizing the speed, power, and precision we strive for in our database. Over time, it’s become a core part of our culture: from weekly “Tiger Time” All Hands and monthly “State of the Tiger” business reviews, to welcoming new teammates as “tiger cubs” to the “jungle.”

Cringe...!!!

Can you imagine joining a company and getting referred to as a tiger cub. I suspect they don’t have much in way of HR

It's all relative¹.

1: https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/11/10...

Companies with much in way of HR are even worse

Yeah, the kind of BS a pointy-haired boss or tech-bro considers foster "company culture"

Meh, it's just a bit of fun. While I don't lean too much into it myself, it's a good way of finding a company where all the grumpy hermits have self-selected themselves away.

Not wanting to be a "tiger cub" introduced to the "jungle" does not make one a grumpy hermit.

Nah, that's the kind of corporate "fun" the grumpy hermits impose

Copying what I viewed as the key parts:

> The majority of workloads on our Cloud product aren’t time-series. Companies are running entire applications on us... So we are now “TigerData.” We offer the fastest PostgreSQL. ... Our cloud offering is “Tiger Cloud.” Our logo stays the same: the tiger, looking forward, focused and fast... Our open source time-series PostgreSQL extension remains TimescaleDB. Our vector extension is still pgvectorscale. Why “Tiger”? The tiger has been our mascot since 2017, symbolizing the speed, power, and precision we strive for in our database.

Given the logo (and internal company culture around the tiger mascot), I understand where they're coming from, but with the name conflicts (TigerBeetle, WiredTiger, etc) I do wish they'd chosen something else -- like maybe TiScaleDB and give a titanium sheen, do triple duty with the tiger and the Timescale heritage?

They did not have to choose anything else - timescaledb was just fine.

There is already tidb :)

> “While I appreciate PostgreSQL every day, am I the only one who thinks this is a rather bad idea?” – top HackerNews comment on our launch (link)

I know it's popular to bash the HackerNews hivemind, and often it's honestly deserved, but this line is in bad taste. The comment was not only polite and professional, it was also right. They had to introduce a columnar storage format (hypertables) to make it work. That is exactly what the comment and the follow-up cocmment suggest.

That's fair. We referenced that quote because it captured a lot of the skepticism in the early days (and because that comment is public). No hard feelings though!

That’s fair, but I would never point out a single individual over this, even if they were really mean about it. It’s just not a good look.

Together with the other paragraph with the bashing of the competition this just looks like your company starts to develop an echo chamber where you’re internally so fine with speaking like that, that it leaks out to the public. For comparison, at my company we don’t even speak about our competition like that internally. Let your readers come to the conclusion that you’re better than the competition by showing the necessary facts only.

Choosing a name like that made me think they were acquired by TigerBeetle. Come on like

Tiger here, let's go!

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