In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Michael Freedman, CTO of Timescale and professor of computer science at Princeton University. When I first heard that Freedman and his collaborators were building a time-series database, my immediate reaction was: “Don’t we have enough options already?” The early incarnation of Timescale was a startup focused on IoT, and it was while building tools for the IoT problem space that Freedman and the rest of the Timescale team came to realize that the database they needed wasn’t available (at least out in open source). Specifically, they wanted a database that could easily support complex queries and the sort of real-time applications many have come to associate with streaming platforms. Based on early reactions to TimescaleDB, many users concur.

A Scalable Time-Series Database That Supports SQL

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Kinan Faham (the Silent Camera) is a software engineer with interests in visual and sonic arts.

A Scalable Time-Series Database That Supports SQL

O'Reilly Radar