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Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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