3,400+ stars, 20+ releases, 30+ talks, and production deployments worldwide: Here’s a recap of Timescale’s first year

As we head into the new year, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on 2017 and thank everyone who has helped us along the way. So, to our users, developers, community members (especially those of you active in our Slack channel), investors, partners, and all our other cheerleaders: Thank You.

In 2017, PostgreSQL became the fastest growing database in the world, and time-series continued its reign as the fastest growing database category (source: DB-Engines). So it makes sense that 2017 would also be the year that someone launched a time-series database built on top of PostgreSQL: TimescaleDB.

We officially launched TimescaleDB on April 4th, 2017, and were pleasantly surprised by all the positive feedback (special shout out to the PostgreSQL community!). And then, just months after our launch, we found that users were already deploying TimescaleDB successfully into production environments and planning new applications around the database.

Now, nine months later, businesses worldwide already trust TimescaleDB for mission-critical applications from industries as varied as manufacturing, finance, utilities, telecom, mining, ad tech, oil & gas, and the smart home. Applications built on TimescaleDB include complex monitoring systems, industrial machine data analysis, geospatial asset tracking, operational data warehousing, and financial risk management.

Look to the stars

Our growth is reflected in our GitHub stars (a mechanism that allows GitHub users to bookmark open source repositories that interest them):

As you can see in the graph above, our 2017 was marked by several inflection points:

• April 4th, 2017: The TimescaleDB initial launch (“When Boring is Awesome: Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL”), soon followed by a technical deep-dive (“Time-series data: Why (and how) to use a relational database instead of NoSQL”).
• June 28th, 2017: Our CTO Mike is interviewed on the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast. Our summer intern, Sarah, dives into the cryptocurrency market and publishes a post that goes to #1 on HackerNews: “Analyzing Ethereum, Bitcoin, and 1200+ other Cryptocurrencies using PostgreSQL.”
• August 10th, 2017: One of our engineers, Rob, publishes our first benchmarks (“TimescaleDB vs. Postgres for time-series: 20x higher inserts, 2000x faster deletes, 1.2x-14,000x faster queries”), and our website again ends up at the top of Hacker News.
• September 25th, 2017: Our CEO Ajay pens a think piece based on general trends we keep seeing: “Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data”, which is viewed over 200,000 times and translated into Russian and Chinese versions.

Other 2017 highlights:

20+ releases, including:

• 0.1.0 (6/28/2017): Graduates from beta, support for in-place upgrades
• 0.2.0 (7/12/2017): Support for triggers on hypertables, hypertable utility functions added
• 0.3.0 (7/31/2017): Support for UPSERTS, improved support for user-defined triggers
• 0.4.0 (8/21/2017): Enhanced constraint exclusion, improved handling of chunk times, and easier recursive schema management
• 0.5.0 (9/20/2017): Improved support for primary-key, foreign-key, and unique constraints, histogram function added
• 0.6.0 (10/12/2017): Major hardening and security work, preparation for compiling on Windows
• 0.7.0 (11/21/2017): Initial PostgreSQL 10 support, which enables TimescaleDB users to benefit from all the new features in PG10
• 0.8.0 (12/19/2017): Windows support, improved tablespace management

30+ talks, including:

• Designing a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL (video)@ PG Conf US 2017
• What the heck is time-series data (and why do I need a time-series database)? (video)@ Percona Live 2017
• When boring is awesome: Making PostgreSQL scale for time-series data @ Strata Data NYC 2017

But that was the past, and now our focus is on 2018. There’s already a lot in the pipeline that we can’t wait to share with you. Stay tuned!

Until then, whether you’ve been steadily following our progress or are just learning of Timescale, be sure to download TimescaleDB and join us in Slack.

Here’s to 2018!

Oh, and we’re hiring:

• Core Database Engineer (NYC, Stockholm)
• R & D Engineer (NYC, Stockholm)
• Solutions Engineer (NYC, Stockholm)
• Customer Success Lead (NYC)
• Technical Account Manager (NYC, Stockholm)

Interested in one of these positions? Please reach out at jobs@timescale.com.

Other questions, feedback, comments? Please email us at hello@timescale.com.