Interview with Timescale
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not neccessarily represent those of the PGConf.EU 2022 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
- In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most, and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
We recently released the State of PostgreSQL report (the third edition), which details several growth opportunities. We see PostgreSQL becoming more and more acceptable. According to the report, Open source ranked as the #1 reason people choose PostgreSQL (19.3%). This shows that Open source continues to be a high-value proposition for most users. The usage statistics also show that 95% of all respondents use PostgreSQL at work, and 73.5% use Postgres for personal and professional projects offering a more comprehensive range of adoption. At Timescale, we continue to provide data insights to support this healthy community.
- What is your company’s mission?
Timescale’s mission is to help build the next wave of computing, serve developers worldwide, and make this world a better place.
We recognize that time-series data is everywhere, and we enable organizations to measure how systems are changing and the causes and effects of these changes to help them deliver the demands of their business.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
Timescale is a globally remote, geographically diverse company with over 150 employees across 25 countries. Our people are our greatest asset; they are from all over the world and contribute to our fun-loving culture. We believe work and fun should co-exist and consciously foster an environment for mutual learning, exchange of ideas, and continuous improvement.
Timescale has a culture of empowerment, facilitating women’s development, leadership training, and executive coaching.
- Why does your company attend PostgreSQL Conference Europe?
Timescale’s love for PostgreSQL, one of the world’s most advanced open-source databases with 30+ years of history, runs deep. We built our products on PostgreSQL, are proud members of the PostgreSQL community, and wouldn’t exist without it and the extensibility it provides.
Attending PostgreSQL Conference allows us to interact with other members of this community, further enabling our desire to provide more significant insights into the vibrant and growing PostgreSQL user base and learn from other renowned experts.
- Which feature is missing in PostgreSQL?
Native support for high availability deployments. There are several competing third-party solutions, all of which have their caveats and blind spots. Some of the most popular ones require yet another key/value store in addition to Postgres.
- Which of your company’s contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
In March, we formed a team 100% focused on upstream contributions. We have a sizable number of full-time contributors and are hiring more. In the past 3-4 months, our contributions have been chiefly code reviews and bug fixes, but we are working on delivering more significant input very soon.
- What is the most annoying PostgreSQL problem, and do you have plans or ideas to fix it?
Transaction ID wraparound stands out as an identifiable problem. We recently joined an effort to deliver 64-bit XIDs to PostgreSQL to mitigate this issue and hope this will be a solution soon.