Moving Faster From PoC to Prod With Timescale UI Tooling

Timescale has been busy expanding our offerings, helping users onboard easily onto Timescale from proof of concept to production. We provide tooling for every stage, beginning with data migration, and offering assisted configuration of all TimescaleDB-specific features like hypertables, continuous aggregates, and compression. 

Much has changed since Timescale’s inception, but one constant remains: we want to make developers’ lives easier by allowing you to focus on your application, not your database. Proper tooling to move you faster from zero to one is a huge part of this mission, as is honoring and improving PostgreSQL’s renowned developer experience. As PostgreSQL enthusiasts who built a supercharged PostgreSQL database, we want to improve its ease of use and apply it to everything we do.

So today, we are introducing our data migration wizards, tools to help adopt TimescaleDB features central to performance gains, and a new Actions hub to help guide users through the entire onboarding process. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through each of these additions.

Import Your Data Quickly and Easily

A critical step in getting started with Timescale—whether evaluating the platform during the free trial or performing a production migration—is migrating some portion (or all) of your data onto Timescale. Timescale provides a variety of tools to help with this process, meeting you in your development process. Beyond providing libraries for your favorite development languages, we’ve recently launched the ability to upload CSV and Parquet files directly through the Timescale console. 

CSV data import

Parquet data import

For customers who prefer to use classic PostgreSQL migration tools like pg_dump, we also offer a data migration wizard that allows configuration of the exact data you would like to test with, along a variety of dimensions. These options range from a schema-only migration for customers with staunch compliance requirements to filters to select only a single problematic table. It also allows you to specify a time range to migrate in order to only migrate a subset of your data.

Our hope in providing these tools is to make the migration experience as painless as possible and allow users to focus on their customer experience rather than wrangling with their database. We are continuing to expand these options, too, including tooling for MySQL migrations. If there is an option you are missing, you can always reach out and let us know directly in the console (in the sidebar, go to Help and support > Send feedback to the Product team)!

Supercharge PostgreSQL Faster

Along with migrating data is the actual implementation of TimescaleDB’s core features, including hypertables, compression, and continuous aggregates. Adopting these features is where the bulk of performance gains comes from, but they are often new concepts for many users. We have built tooling for these three TimescaleDB core features to help you quickly and easily set them up via the UI. 

The hypertable wizard guides the user through the process of creating a table and converting it to a hypertable. Once the hypertable is created, users can ingest data into their hypertable just as they would a normal PostgreSQL table. Users can also choose their “chunk interval,” which determines how large the chunks (partitions) will be in their hypertable.

The continuous aggregate wizard walks the user through the process of creating a view and then setting up a refresh policy to ensure the view is continuously updated. The tool allows you to do this directly within the UI rather than having to configure it from the terminal. The continuous aggregate creation tool is available in Operations > Continuous aggregates, where you can select the hypertable you would like to create a continuous aggregate from.

Similarly, the compression wizard talks the user through the process of configuring compression on a hypertable. From Operations > Storage configuration, users can select the hypertable they wish to compress and set up their compression policy.

The extension wizard guides users through a list of supported PostgreSQL extensions. It offers a one-click option to enable desired extensions. Users simply need to click "Run" to create the extension.

Onboarding With the Actions Hub

At any point during your Timescale journey, if you aren’t sure what to do or are looking for recommendations, Timescale now offers an Action hub that is curated for each service! Within the Actions hub, users can find recommendations for what they can do next to get fully and properly set up with Timescale. At the moment, there are only a few Actions for users to act on, but our team is hard at work expanding these actions and giving context-specific recommendations to help customers get the most value and performance out of their database.

Final Words

Our team is continuously looking for ways to make onboarding onto Timescale as easy and seamless as possible. If you have been curious about Timescale before but were not ready for the change, it may now be a good time to start a free trial and try it out with yourself!