4 ms·

Does this come pre-configured for high availability (e.g. replication to a standby node)? Given the pricing I would have assumed "yes", but I don't see any ment

Does this come pre-configured for high availability (e.g. replication to a standby node)? Given the pricing I would have assumed "yes", but I don't see any mention of it in the blog post?

GordonS 6y ago
I meant to ask about backup with point-in-time restore too - is that provided out of the box?
- mfreed 6y ago
  Yes, there are a number of great options here provided out-of-box: 1. All plans (including the lowest-cost dev tier) includes PITR recovery out of the box. You can also "fork" any current database to a second instance (e.g., for dev & test), also at any recent point-in-time. 2. Once you create any instance, you can later create a "read replica" with one click, which creates an asynchronous replica of your primary (e.g., for ad-hoc queries to not interfere with the primary, or to just load-balance reads). 3. On the HA side, our "pro" plans includes automatic synchronous replication between primary/replica, so that any primary crashes failover without downtime to the replica. You also get DNS-named endpoints for replicas, again for load balancing reads.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    On the Basic tier, I presume you have to pay for those read-only replicas? Can they be used for automatic failover, or only for scaling reads? I don't know what VM SKUs you use on Azure, but at a glance it looks like your solution would cost 300-400% the cost of the VM, just for your Basic tier. As a fan of TimescaleDB, I really want to like this, but I'm just not seeing enough value-add for the price. Maybe I'm missing something, please sell me on the benefits over managing VMs myself?
temp667 6y ago
I'm curious when folks say they expect a dev plan offering at a pretty low price point to come out of the box with HA - are they comparing this to an Oracle High Availability solution? Because $75 or $150 for HA on oracle is not going to happen - period. It's just interesting how the price points are so wildly divergent.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I don't know what you are on about - I didn't mention Oracle, and would never compare TimescaleDB to a product that wants to bankrupt you and own your soul. Using the price calculator linked in the article, on Azure the cheapest "Dev" tier (which I obviously wouldn't expect to have HA based on the name "Dev" alone) is $160/m - that's a lot for 1 vCPU and 4GB RAM. I want to give TimescaleDB money, but I just can't justify that. The cheapest in the Basic tier on Azure is $715/m - yes, you can bet I expect HA at that price for 4 vCPUs and 16GB RAM. I'm a big fan of TimescaleDB, but if they are competing with cloud provider's own managed solutions (which, AFAIK, all come with HA and PITR), it needs to ship with similar guarantees, and/or the pricing needs to be revised.
  - mfreed 6y ago
    Pricing differs on Timescale Cloud based on the cloud & region to reflect variances of the underlying costs of running infrastructure on those regions. Azure Postgres and AWS RDS do _not_ include HA replication in their base price -- you need to pay extra for actual replicas. What they do provide is the fact that they use decoupled storage to automatically recreate the database in the case of failure (which we do as well). But that's not the same thing as ~zero downtime from migrating to a synchronous replica, which you can also use for scaling read queries.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      I realise the HA solution included with Azure doesn't have replication, but it does provide a 99.99% SLA and suggests any downtime would be in the order of seconds. This is done, as you say, by recreating the database on a new node, but they have nodes standing by and ready. For a lot of use cases, that is good enough, with read-only replicas useful at an extra cost for scaling reads. My point is that TimescaleDB's pricing is high enough that I'd expect replication to be provided, or at least some other kind of HA guarantee.
      - akulkarni 6y ago
        I actually think this is a false comparison. With TimescaleDB you get higher inserts, 1000x faster queries (depending on your query, of course), 95% storage savings from native compression, etc., than with vanilla Postgres. You also get really useful features like continuous aggregates, data retention policies, interpolation, etc. So the comparison isn't really 1-to-1. Depending on your workload, you could easily get better performance out of 1 vCPU on Timescale Cloud than 4 vCPU on any vanilla Postgres service (not to mention the 95% cost savings on storage). (I work at Timescale.)

Does this come pre-configured for high availability (e.g. replication to a standby node)? Given the pricing I would have assumed "yes", but I don't see any mention of it in the blog post?

GordonS 6y ago

I meant to ask about backup with point-in-time restore too - is that provided out of the box?

mfreed 6y ago
Yes, there are a number of great options here provided out-of-box: 1. All plans (including the lowest-cost dev tier) includes PITR recovery out of the box. You can also "fork" any current database to a second instance (e.g., for dev & test), also at any recent point-in-time. 2. Once you create any instance, you can later create a "read replica" with one click, which creates an asynchronous replica of your primary (e.g., for ad-hoc queries to not interfere with the primary, or to just load-balance reads). 3. On the HA side, our "pro" plans includes automatic synchronous replication between primary/replica, so that any primary crashes failover without downtime to the replica. You also get DNS-named endpoints for replicas, again for load balancing reads.
- GordonS 6y ago
  On the Basic tier, I presume you have to pay for those read-only replicas? Can they be used for automatic failover, or only for scaling reads? I don't know what VM SKUs you use on Azure, but at a glance it looks like your solution would cost 300-400% the cost of the VM, just for your Basic tier. As a fan of TimescaleDB, I really want to like this, but I'm just not seeing enough value-add for the price. Maybe I'm missing something, please sell me on the benefits over managing VMs myself?

temp667 6y ago

I'm curious when folks say they expect a dev plan offering at a pretty low price point to come out of the box with HA - are they comparing this to an Oracle High Availability solution? Because $75 or $150 for HA on oracle is not going to happen - period. It's just interesting how the price points are so wildly divergent.

GordonS 6y ago
I don't know what you are on about - I didn't mention Oracle, and would never compare TimescaleDB to a product that wants to bankrupt you and own your soul. Using the price calculator linked in the article, on Azure the cheapest "Dev" tier (which I obviously wouldn't expect to have HA based on the name "Dev" alone) is $160/m - that's a lot for 1 vCPU and 4GB RAM. I want to give TimescaleDB money, but I just can't justify that. The cheapest in the Basic tier on Azure is $715/m - yes, you can bet I expect HA at that price for 4 vCPUs and 16GB RAM. I'm a big fan of TimescaleDB, but if they are competing with cloud provider's own managed solutions (which, AFAIK, all come with HA and PITR), it needs to ship with similar guarantees, and/or the pricing needs to be revised.
- mfreed 6y ago
  Pricing differs on Timescale Cloud based on the cloud & region to reflect variances of the underlying costs of running infrastructure on those regions. Azure Postgres and AWS RDS do _not_ include HA replication in their base price -- you need to pay extra for actual replicas. What they do provide is the fact that they use decoupled storage to automatically recreate the database in the case of failure (which we do as well). But that's not the same thing as ~zero downtime from migrating to a synchronous replica, which you can also use for scaling read queries.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I realise the HA solution included with Azure doesn't have replication, but it does provide a 99.99% SLA and suggests any downtime would be in the order of seconds. This is done, as you say, by recreating the database on a new node, but they have nodes standing by and ready. For a lot of use cases, that is good enough, with read-only replicas useful at an extra cost for scaling reads. My point is that TimescaleDB's pricing is high enough that I'd expect replication to be provided, or at least some other kind of HA guarantee.
    - akulkarni 6y ago
      I actually think this is a false comparison. With TimescaleDB you get higher inserts, 1000x faster queries (depending on your query, of course), 95% storage savings from native compression, etc., than with vanilla Postgres. You also get really useful features like continuous aggregates, data retention policies, interpolation, etc. So the comparison isn't really 1-to-1. Depending on your workload, you could easily get better performance out of 1 vCPU on Timescale Cloud than 4 vCPU on any vanilla Postgres service (not to mention the 95% cost savings on storage). (I work at Timescale.)