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.
smokel 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mellosouls 4 hours ago [-]
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.
inamorty 4 hours ago [-]
I concur, the tone is very off-putting.
sgarland 4 hours ago [-]
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].
Yeah they might be good but the marketing is really bold and, to a certain extent, arrogant if not outright disgusting.
suyash 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ethagnawl 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jabiko 10 hours ago [-]
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.
ramonguiu 8 hours ago [-]
@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).
apgwoz 14 hours ago [-]
So there’s TigerData and TigerBeetle. I wish they would have chosen a different fast cat…
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.
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
We chose the Tiger back in April 2017.
Also TigerBeetle is an insect, not a fast cat.
apgwoz 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?
agos 4 hours ago [-]
they even have a similar palette on their website, I could have sworn they were from the same company
tao_oat 7 hours ago [-]
And TigerGraph, too!
12 hours ago [-]
Dowwie 6 hours ago [-]
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?
sgarland 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pixl97 2 hours ago [-]
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.
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Would love to hear more if you are open to it: ajay [at] tigerdata [dot] com.
tianqi 1 hours ago [-]
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.
conradev 10 hours ago [-]
TigerData is bold, fast, and built to power the next era of software.
When I saw the headline I immediately thought that TigerData is somehow related to the TigerBeetle.
cakoose 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
politelemon 10 hours ago [-]
I think this just illustrates the tech bubble we live in. Occasionally we find one that doesn't match ours.
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly!
"The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson
dgellow 10 hours ago [-]
I had the same thought. They are off by a few years
spooneybarger 5 hours ago [-]
Marketing is going to market.
ahmadtbk 1 hours ago [-]
Timescale is a much cooler name. Also heres a conversation I just had with Jippity. There are some nicer names imo.
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.
Rebelgecko 4 hours ago [-]
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
ejs 6 hours ago [-]
Since this is a timescaleDB topic, would timescale not work? (With a basic DB and a few continuous aggregates running in the background?)
skowalak 5 hours ago [-]
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.
suyash 5 hours ago [-]
I would go with InfluxDB, actually it's powers several Home Assistant apps behind the scene already for a reason.
suyash 2 hours ago [-]
btw I work at InfluxData and happy to answer any question, just ask here or reach our in our forums
zlib 7 hours ago [-]
Timescale is much better
koakuma-chan 5 hours ago [-]
They should have kept timescale
rbaudibert 10 hours ago [-]
TIL you can have GIFs as the `og:image` and Slack and friends will render them as GIFs, actually wild
LeonM 8 hours ago [-]
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?
aorth 3 hours ago [-]
They learned something and wanted to share.
Did you try Slack?
7 hours ago [-]
geodel 1 hours ago [-]
So we do have Tiger management, Tiger base, Tiger Systems. Now with Tiger data if they all combine we may have a TigerDBMS.
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.
justinmitchel 22 hours ago [-]
> "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!
ejs 6 hours ago [-]
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.
lukaslalinsky 13 hours ago [-]
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.
NewJazz 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jitl 13 hours ago [-]
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.
coldtea 7 hours ago [-]
We only care for them to the degree they do "time series things".
Not for AI or other bs "pivots"
blitzar 9 hours ago [-]
pivot from time to ai
jamesgresql 9 hours ago [-]
Not the case!
gangstead 1 hours ago [-]
Then why reference the "Agentic Era" in the title?
nelsonfigueroa 13 hours ago [-]
well at least they didn't append "AI" to their name
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
That was one of our requirements when we started discussing a name change. :-)
28304283409234 2 hours ago [-]
Missed opportunity for TaigerData ;-)
3 hours ago [-]
doctoboggan 13 hours ago [-]
> InfluxDB, and other NoSQL databases are seen as technical dead ends.
Is influxdb really seen as a dead end?
physicles 12 hours ago [-]
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.
pauldix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kawsper 3 hours ago [-]
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.
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
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
lawn 10 hours ago [-]
I've been burned by influxdb abandoning their old versions one too many times and will never consider it for anything ever again.
suyash 5 hours ago [-]
Quite the opposite, InfluxDB 3 is the best time series database currently in the market in terms of features and performance.
suyash 2 hours ago [-]
(full disclosure, I work at InfluxData so my answer is biased).
blitzar 9 hours ago [-]
I use victoriametrics now, seems to be ok
dzonga 7 hours ago [-]
I met these folks one time in NYC, you could tell they were onto something big & bigger.
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
Thank you for recognizing that in us.
8K832d7tNmiQ 13 hours ago [-]
Why not TigerScale ?
totetsu 7 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a skin disease from Game of Thrones
nwhnwh 11 hours ago [-]
Tigers don't scale.
NewJazz 10 hours ago [-]
Tigers are great climbers.
aduwah 11 hours ago [-]
But you can scale a tiger
bobosha 5 hours ago [-]
yet they do data.
alexpadula 11 hours ago [-]
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.
heeton 9 hours ago [-]
Bad choice imo, given that there is another database called tiger beetle. I assumed they’d merged when I saw the title.
eska 7 hours ago [-]
Missed opportunity for the AI pivot: Taiger Data. I'll see myself out.
pmalynin 14 hours ago [-]
Which has nothing to do with WiredTiger I guess?
georgewfraser 13 hours ago [-]
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?
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.
akulkarni 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Yes, TigerData aka Timescale tried to make a fuss a few years ago comparing Clickhouse and TimescaleDB, but they failed.
freilanzer 3 hours ago [-]
DuckDB seems to be the most interesting there.
victorbjorklund 10 hours ago [-]
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.
viccis 12 hours ago [-]
Do you think all time series databases (like InfluxDB for example) are useless compared to "columnar databases" that "do those things" or just Timescale?
yuretz 12 hours ago [-]
Few years have passed and your guess is still wrong.
fellatio 11 hours ago [-]
Unfair anecdote as you don't mention what he said before and after "he got mad" (whatever that means).
7 hours ago [-]
v5v3 10 hours ago [-]
"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...!!!
lijok 8 hours ago [-]
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
Yeah, the kind of BS a pointy-haired boss or tech-bro considers foster "company culture"
matsemann 6 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
freilanzer 3 hours ago [-]
Not wanting to be a "tiger cub" introduced to the "jungle" does not make one a grumpy hermit.
7 hours ago [-]
rattray 13 hours ago [-]
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?
HackerThemAll 9 hours ago [-]
They did not have to choose anything else - timescaledb was just fine.
0xdeafbeef 10 hours ago [-]
There is already tidb :)
10 hours ago [-]
7 hours ago [-]
eska 7 hours ago [-]
> “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.
akulkarni 38 minutes ago [-]
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!
7 hours ago [-]
be87581d 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
morelish 10 hours ago [-]
Choosing a name like that made me think they were acquired by TigerBeetle. Come on like
4 hours ago [-]
toddmorey 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
7 hours ago [-]
jamesgresql 22 hours ago [-]
Tiger here, let's go!
jeffchuber 14 hours ago [-]
going to be super confusing that there is now tigerdata and tigergraph - both database companies
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.
There's an element of immaturity in the style that they should probably work on.
[0]: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs
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.
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.
* 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.
Also TigerBeetle is an insect, not a fast cat.
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?
Query optimization is one of those places where it can be easy to get orders of magnitude performance increases.
In 2017? I thought the NoSQL hype had subsided by then and everyone was excited about distributed transactions -- Spanner, Cockroach, Fauna, Foundation, etc.
"The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson
https://chatgpt.com/share/6852de93-1384-8004-ac63-4ae93a8373...
Care to elaborate on why you posted this?
Did you try Slack?
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".
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.
Cool!
I recommend it when you don't want/need to have separate sources for account data and your metrics/aggregate data.
Not for AI or other bs "pivots"
Is influxdb really seen as a dead end?
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.
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.
I guess it’s just another columnar dbms after all?
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.
"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/
Cringe...!!!
1: https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/11/10...
> 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?
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.