Timescale Newsletter Roundup: April Edition

From launching our new Guide to Grafana 101 coding series to releasing TimescaleDB 1.7, April was a busy month at Team Timescale ✅. Check out the below for an all-in-one guide to our latest technical content, virtual events, product updates, and more.

We’re always releasing new features, creating new documentation and tutorials, and hosting virtual sessions to help developers do amazing things with their data. And, to make it easy for our community members to discover and get the resources they need to power their projects, teams, or business with analytics, we round up our favorite new pieces in our biweekly newsletter.

We’re on a mission to teach the world about time-series data, supporting and growing communities around the world.

...sharing educational resources as broadly as possible is one way to do just that :).

Here’s a snapshot of the content we shared with our readers this month (subscribe to get updates straight to your inbox)

New technical content, videos & tutorials

[Session Replay & Attendee Q +A ] Guide to Grafana 101 #1: Getting Started with (awesome) Visualizations >>

If you work with data, odds are that you need - or want - to visualize it. Avthar, Timescale Dev Advocate and dashboarding pro, uses 3 different scenarios to demo building 5+ different types of Grafana charts, graphs, gauges, and more.

• 🔧 Get straight to the tutorial.
• 💡 Check out our series-override and variables blogs to learn how to accurately compare trends and create interactive graphs.

[Live-coding session]  Guide to Grafana 101 #2: Getting Started with Alerts >>

Join our next Guide to Grafana session and follow along as Avthar demos how (and why) to use Grafana’s alerting functionality. You'll walkthrough defining alerts for the metrics you care about, configuring Slack and email notifications for anomalies, and get pro tips to help you identify root causes and fix issues quickly.  

• 🎉 Sign up here - even if you can’t attend live on May 20, you’ll receive the recording & all resources.

[Blog]: Time-series Compression Algorithms, Explained >>

What are compression algorithms and how do they work? While they’re not quite magic, they do speed up your queries up to 90% – and Ajay & Josh teamed up to break down various types (+ when and how you’d use them).

New #remote-friendly events & community

[Blog]: DataPub #1: wrangling public data, handling geospatial images, and writing faster queries >>

Our guest speakers covered everything from techniques for wrangling public data and ways to better handle geospatial images to how to write faster queries (so you have more time to play Animal Crossing 🐯).

[Session Replay]: DataPub #2 April: OpenLitterMap, SolarNetwork, and Making the World a Better Place >>

Our monthly meetup for data enthusiasts continues, and this month’s guests share how they use open data to fight pollution (“the Snapchat of litter”) and allow businesses, governments, and citizens to take control of their energy consumption.

• ✋ Are you an open data enthusiast? Sign up for the May 19 session.
• 🎤 If you’d like to speak or propose a  topic, reply and we’ll route you to the right team.

[3 NEW Customer Stories]: See how Blue Sky Analytics, k6, and Senseforce set up their data stacks >>

These stories reiterate the power of data and how it enables organizations to do amazing things with data - from architecting a platform to monitor and understand climate change to building a load testing tool for some of the largest eCommerce brands to making Industrial IoT accessible to small-to-medium sized businesses.

• 🌍 Read Blue Sky Analytics’ story (they’re on a mission to become the Bloomberg of environmental data).
• 🚀 Read k6’s story (they’re building a high-performance load testing tool designed to help organizations build resilient systems).
• ⛑ Read Senseforce’s story (they’re creating a way for anyone to work with industrial machine data, no advanced IT know-how required).
• Have your own story to share? Reply or reach out on Slack - we love to celebrate our customers.

Etc.

[Product Updates]: TimescaleDB 1.7 brings PG12 support, real-time aggregates, and new FREE features >>

Our latest release brings the much anticipated PG12 support, new continuous aggregation functionality, data management capabilities in our Community Edition, bugfixes, and beyond.

• ✨ Read our release blog for a full breakdown of what’s new and how to get started.
• 🔮 Get detailed release notes and see what we’re planning next.

[TimescaleDB Tip #1]: Enable and optimize native compression >>

This feature - released with TimescaleDB 1.5 in November - shrinks the space that data takes up on your disk, while still allowing you to store the same quantity of data (e.g., 24 hours or 30 days’ worth).

• ⛏ The docs walk through how to set it up with general best practices, but reach out on Slack and we’ll make sure you optimize for your database.

[TimescaleDB Tip #2]: Setup data retention & downsampling policies >>

Automatic data retention policies and downsampling ensure you to rollup and retain the data you need (like daily averages or the prior week’s metrics), and delete fine-grained data when it’s no longer necessary.

• ⌛ Read more about data retention policies here.
• Have questions or need help along the way? That’s what we’re here for - reach out on Slack at any time.

[Reading List]: What Moral Psychology, the Rust Belt, and framing can teach us about UX >>

Timescale Product Manager Alex shares 6 of his team’s recent reads and what each taught him about building products users love.

• 📚 If you have a book recommendation or want to discuss a title, say hi to Alex on Slack - he’s always looking for new reads.

[Reading List]: CTO Corner: this month in data (April 2020 edition) >>

Mike Freedman, Timescale CTO and Princeton professor, shares some of the most interesting articles about databases and distributed systems he's found in the past month, from AWS’ Firecracker to Dropbox’s new sync engine.

• 💬 Have a suggestion or comment for Mike’s reading list? Find him on Slack.

[Timescale Team Fun]: Missing your officemates or looking for new Zoom remote-meeting inspiration? Our People Manager, Mel, is chock-full of ideas...

Wrapping Up

And, that concludes this month’s newsletter roundup. We’ll continue to release new content, events, and more - posting monthly updates for everyone.

If you’d like to get updates as soon as they’re available, subscribe to our newsletter (2x monthly emails, prepared with 💛and no fluff or jargon, promise).

Happy building!