throwawaytsdb

PostgreSQL might have only seven people on the "core team", but the active contributors list is much longer: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers

Furthermore, hundreds of people have been responsible for its development over the years: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

As an additional, possibly more relevant example - the Cortex project has 158 contributors: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex

My larger point is that, in contrast with the new project, InfluxDB currently has ~400 contributors. I'm certain that many dozens of those were involved in getting the current storage engine to a stable place. And now that hard work is on a path to being deprecated by moving to a completely new language and set of underlying technologies.

Taking the project from a handful of contributors to a production-ready technology within an existing ecosystem is a non-trivial task. I'm sure it will come together eventually, but the commitment to ship it "early next year" seems unlikely to me.

I agree, they appear to be playing catch up on many fronts. Notably, with Cortex, Tempo, and Loki, Grafana Labs seem to have pulled way ahead in advancing a successful open-source cloud observability strategy.

InfluxData have a long history of writing (and rewriting) their own storage engines, so choosing to do it again is unsurprising. I guess this sort of hints that the current TSM/TSI have probably reached their performance and scalability limits and will be EOL before too long.

What I find interesting is that this project is already almost a year old and only has six contributors (two of whom look like external contractors). It seems more like a fun side project than the future core of the database that is supposed to be deployed into production next year.