akulkarni (u/akulkarni)

akulkarni commented on TimescaleDB helped us scale analytics and reporting blog.cloudflare.com/times... · Posted by u/arunmu

arunmu · a month ago

I am a big fan of cloudflare blogs. The tech blogs are usually highly detailed and there is so much to learn from those.

But this one, interesting but was not a practical choice at all from what I gather reading the blog. The reason given for not using Clickhouse which they are already using for analytics was vague and ambiguous. Clickhouse does support JSON which can be re-written into a more structured table using MV. Aggregation and other performance tuning steps are bread and butter of using Clickhouse.

The decision to go with postgres and learn the already known limitations the hard way and then continue using it by bringing up a new technology (Timescale) does not sound good, assuming that Cloudflare at this point might already have lots of internal tools for monitoring clickhouse clusters.

akulkarni · a month ago

That's interesting. Personally I did not find it vague and ambiguous.

ClickHouse was fast but required a lot of extra pieces for it to work:

    Writing data to Clickhouse

    Your service must generate logs in a clear format, using Cap'n Proto or Protocol Buffers. Logs should be written to a socket for logfwdr to transport to PDX, then to a Kafka topic. Use a Concept:Inserter to read from Kafka, batching data to achieve a write rate of less than one batch per second.

    Oh. That’s a lot. Including ClickHouse and the WARP client, we’re looking at five boxes to be added to the system diagram. 

    So it became clear that ClickHouse is a sports car and to get value out of it we had to bring it to a race track, shift into high gear, and drive it at top speed. But we didn’t need a race car — we needed a daily driver for short trips to a grocery store. For our initial launch, we didn’t need millions of inserts per second. We needed something easy to set up, reliable, familiar, and good enough to get us to market. A colleague suggested we just use PostgreSQL, quoting “it can be cranked up” to handle the load we were expecting. So, we took the leap!

PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB did the job. Why overcomplicate things?

akulkarni commented on What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon debate blog.alexoglou.com/posts/... · Posted by u/konsalexee

akulkarni · 2 months ago

I agree with the overall sentiment of this post.

I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.

Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.

Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.

PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

eska · 2 months 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 · 2 months 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!

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

28304283409234 · 2 months ago

Missed opportunity for TaigerData ;-)

akulkarni · 2 months ago

:-)

I can't imagine the comments if we had chosen that...

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

nelsonfigueroa · 2 months ago

well at least they didn't append "AI" to their name

akulkarni · 2 months ago

That was one of our requirements when we started discussing a name change. :-)

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

Dowwie · 2 months 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?

akulkarni · 2 months 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.

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

dangoodmanUT · 2 months ago

They don't do well on benchmarks https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/

akulkarni · 2 months 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.

[0] https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/benchmarking-databases-for-re...

[1] https://rtabench.com/

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

dzonga · 2 months ago

I met these folks one time in NYC, you could tell they were onto something big & bigger.

akulkarni · 2 months ago

Thank you for recognizing that in us.

akulkarni commented on Timescale Is Now TigerData tigerdata.com/blog/timesc... · Posted by u/pbowyer

politelemon · 2 months ago

I think this just illustrates the tech bubble we live in. Occasionally we find one that doesn't match ours.

akulkarni · 2 months ago

Exactly!

"The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson