Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Timescale, makers of the open-source TimescaleDB time series database, announced a $40 million Series B financing round today. The investment comes just over two years after it got a $15 million Series A.

Redpoint Ventures led today’s round, with help from existing investors Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Icon Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures. The company reports it has now raised approximately $70 million.

TimescaleDB lets users measure data across a time dimension, so anything that would change over time. “What we found is we need a purpose-built database for it to handle scalability, reliability and performance, and we like to think of ourselves as the category-defining relational database for time series,” CEO and co-founder Ajay Kulkarni explained.

He says that the choice to build their database on top of Postgres when it launched four years ago was a key decision. “There are a few different databases that are designed for time series, but we’re the only one where developers get the purpose-built time series database plus a complete Postgres database all in one,” he said.

While the company has an open-source version, last year it decided rather than selling an enterprise version (as it had been), it was going to include all of that functionality in the free version of the product and place a bet entirely on the cloud for revenue.

“We decided that we’re going to make a bold bet on the cloud. We think cloud is where the future of database adoption is, and so in the last year […] we made all of our enterprise features free. If you want to test it yourself, you get the whole thing, but if you want a managed service, then we’re available to run it for you,” he said.

The community approach is working to attract users, with over 2 million monthly active databases, some of which the company is betting will convert to the cloud service over time. Timescale is based in New York City, but it’s a truly remote organization, with 60 employees spread across 20 countries and every continent except Antarctica.

He says that as a global company, it creates new dimensions of diversity and different ways of thinking about it. “I think one thing that is actually kind of an interesting challenge for us is what does D&I mean in a totally global org. A lot of people focus on diversity and inclusion within the U.S., but we think we’re doing better than most tech companies in terms of racial diversity, gender diversity,” he said.

And being remote-first isn’t going to change even when we get past the pandemic. “I think it may not work for every business, but I think being remote first has been a really good thing for us,” he said.

It’s a big day for Timescale, makers of the open-source time-series database, TimescaleDB. The company announced a $15 million investment and a new enterprise version of the product.

The investment is technically an extension of the $12.4 million Series A it raised last January, which it’s referring to as A1. Today’s round is led by Icon Ventures, with existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Two Sigma Ventures also participating. With today’s funding, the startup has raised $31 million.

Timescale makes a time-series database. That means it can ingest large amounts of data and measure how it changes over time. This comes in handy for a variety of use cases, from financial services to smart homes to self-driving cars — or any data-intensive activity you want to measure over time.

While there are a number of time-scale database offerings on the market, Timescale co-founder and CEO Ajay Kulkarni says that what makes his company’s approach unique is that it uses SQL, one of the most popular languages in the world. Timescale wanted to take advantage of that penetration and build its product on top of Postgres, the popular open-source SQL database. This gave it an offering that is based on SQL and is highly scalable.

Timescale admittedly came late to the market in 2017, but by offering a unique approach and making it open source, it has been able to gain traction quickly. “Despite entering into what is a very crowded database market, we’ve seen quite a bit of community growth because of this message of SQL and scale for time series,” Kulkarni told TechCrunch.

In just over 22 months, the company has more than a million downloads and a range of users from older guard companies like Charter, Comcast and Hexagon Mining to more modern companies like Nutanix and and TransferWise.

With a strong base community in place, the company believes that it’s now time to commercialize its offering, and in addition to an open-source license, it’s introducing a commercial license. “Up until today, our main business model has been through support and deployment assistance. With this new release, we also will have enterprise features that are available with a commercial license,” Kulkarni explained.

The commercial version will offer a more sophisticated automation layer for larger companies with greater scale requirements. It will also provide better lifecycle management, so companies can get rid of older data or move it to cheaper long-term storage to reduce costs. It’s also offering the ability to reorder data in an automated fashion when that’s required, and, finally, it’s making it easier to turn the time series data into a series of data points for analytics purposes. The company also hinted that a managed cloud version is on the road map for later this year.

The new money should help Timescale continue fueling the growth and development of the product, especially as it builds out the commercial offering. Timescale, which was founded in 2015 in NYC, currently has 30 employees. With the new influx of cash, it expects to double that over the next year.

AWS announced a new time series database today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The new product called DynamoDB On-Demand is a fully managed database designed to track items over time, which can be particularly useful for Internet of Things scenarios.

“With time series data each data point consists of a timestamp and one or more attributes and it really measures how things change over time and helps drive real time decisions,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained.

He sees a problem though with existing open source and commercial solutions, which says don’t scale well and hard to manage. This is of course a problem that a cloud service like AWS often helps solve.

Not surprising as customers were looking for a good time series database solution, AWS decided to create one themselves. “Today we are introducing Amazon DynamoDB on-demand, a flexible new billing option for DynamoDB capable of serving thousands of requests per second without capacity planning,” Danilo Poccia from AWS wrote in the blog post introducing the new service.

Jassy said that they built DynamoDB on-demand from the ground up with an architecture that organizes data by time intervals and enables time series specific data compression, which leads to less scanning and faster performance.

He claims it will be a thousand times faster at a tenth of cost, and of course it scales up and down as required and includes all of the analytics capabilities you need to understand all of the data you are tracking.

This new service is available across the world starting today.

We’ve been searching for a great venue for Percona Live Europe 2018, and I am thrilled to announce we’ll be hosting it in Frankfurt, Germany! Please block November 5-7, 2018 on your calendar now and plan to join us at the Radisson Blu Frankfurt for the premier open source database conference.

We’re in the final days of organizing for the Percona Live 2018 in Santa Clara. You can still purchase tickets for an amazing lineup of keynote speakers, tutorials and sessions. We have ten tracks, including MySQL, MongoDB, Cloud, PostgreSQL, Containers and Automation, Monitoring and Ops, and Database Security. Major areas of focus at the conference will include:

• Database operations and automation at scale, featuring speakers from Facebook, Slack, Github and more
• Databases in the cloud – how database-as-a-service (DBaaS) is changing the DB landscape, featuring speakers from AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba and more
• Security and compliance – how GDPR and other government regulations are changing the way we manage databases, featuring speakers from Fastly, Facebook, Pythian, Percona and more
• Bridging the gap between developers and DBAs – finding common ground, featuring speakers from Square, Oracle, Percona and more

The Call for Papers for Percona Live Europe will open soon. We look forward to seeing you in Santa Clara!

The post Percona Live Europe 2018 – Save the Date! appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

Welcome to another interview blog for the rapidly-approaching Percona Live 2018. Each post in this series highlights a Percona Live 2018 featured talk at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post highlights Mat Arye, Core Database Engineer at Timescale. His talk is titled Databases Have Forgotten About Single Node Performance, A Wrongheaded Trade-Off. Distributed systems were built to scale out for ballooning user bases and operations. As more and more companies vied to be the next Google, Amazon or Facebook, they too “required” horizontal scalability. But in a real way, NoSQL and even NewSQL have forgotten single node performance, where scaling out isn’t an option. And single node performance is important because it allows you to do more with much less.  In our conversation, we discussed why you shouldn’t forget to focus on single-node performance:

Percona: Who are you, and how did you get into databases? What was your path to your current responsibilities?

Mat: My name is Mat Arye. I started working on database infrastructure as part of my graduate studies in distributed systems at Princeton University, with Timescale’s CTO Mike Freedman. My first project was developing the data streaming infrastructure for a cross-continental data analysis system called Jetstream. I was first introduced to working with PostgreSQL as an intern at CloudFlare, where I worked on their request-analysis system. I started working on the precursor to what would become TimescaleDB while working on a data analysis system for an IoT device cloud platform.

Note: Mike Freedman will also be speaking on Wednesday at 12:50 pm in Room M2, giving the talk TimescaleDB: Re-engineering PostgreSQL as a Time-Series Database.

Percona: Your talk is titled Databases Have Forgotten About Single Node Performance, A Wrongheaded Trade-Off. How have people gotten away from single-node performance?

Mat: Well, when the Internet became a thing, people saw the deluge of data that was coming. They realized that a single-node data system would no longer suffice for many data applications. Thus, the focus of a lot of data infrastructure work shifted to creating scale-out systems. For multi-node systems, performance often comes from making the system “scale linearly” (i.e., increase performance by adding nodes). Thus, a “scalable” system meant it could scale-out across multiple servers. The performance of any single node became less important and less optimized. I do think that, as a community, we have now learned a lot about building scale-out systems and that we need to switch back to concentrating on single-node performance for reasons having to do with cost and operational efficiency.

Percona: How does single-node performance fit in with time-series data?

Mat: You can think of time-series data as “live” data. This data is often analyzed on dashboards and near-real-time analysis systems that have very different analysis latency requirements from the BI analytical use cases that data lakes were designed for. Single-node efficiency is important for creating systems that can provide the low-latency results necessary for these live applications. Also, many time-series data settings, especially for IoT related use cases, are remote or at the “edge” (e.g., mining sites, factory floors, satellites, gateways). Single-node performance is important for getting the most out of these smaller footprint or resource-constrained environments.

Percona: Why should people worry about single-node architecture in cloud deployments?

Mat: There are many applications in cloud deployments where the single-node data architecture that systems like TimescaleDB provides is sufficient for their data needs. In such applications, using a single-node cloud deployment can save costs (i.e., easier to use, easier to maintain, especially compared to smaller multi-node instances). It can also decrease the latency for getting query results compared to alternate multi-node systems.

Percona:  Why should people attend your talk? What do you hope people will take away from it?

Mat: I hope that people learn two things: (1) that it is often possible (and desirable) to use efficient single-node data analysis systems for many important real-life applications, and (2) as a community, we should start concentrating on single-node efficiency even in multi-node systems. It sort of goes along with the whole “use the right tool for the job” approach that most people tend to aspire to.

Percona: What are you looking forward to at Percona Live (besides your talk)?

Mat: I always like learning about data analysis systems that take new approaches. The diversity of talks and topics at Percona always gives me the opportunity to learn something new. And of course, meeting new people is fun and educational, and Percona Live gives you a great opportunity for that!

Want to find out more about this Percona Live 2018 featured talk, and single-node database performance? Register for Percona Live 2018, and see Mat’s talk Databases Have Forgotten About Single Node Performance, A Wrongheaded Trade-Off. Register now to get the best price! Use the discount code SeeMeSpeakPL18 for 10% off.

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 is the premier open source event for the data performance ecosystem. It is the place to be for the open source community. Attendees include DBAs, sysadmins, developers, architects, CTOs, CEOs, and vendors from around the world.

The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference will be April 23-25, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.

The post Percona Live 2018 Featured Talk: Databases Have Forgotten About Single Node Performance, A Wrongheaded Trade-Off with Mat Arye appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

 In a world where sensors are capturing ever-increasing amounts of data, being able to collect that high volume and measure it over time becomes increasingly important. InfluxData, the startup built on top of the open source time series database platform, announced it has received a $35 million Series C investment today led by Sapphire Ventures, the investment arm of enterprise software… Read More