Category: All posts
May 01, 2025
Posted by
Grant Godeke
Users demand lightning-fast database performance, but achieving it typically comes at the cost of developer productivity. Timescale Cloud accelerates developer velocity by eliminating the traditional trade-offs between speed and simplicity.
Built on Postgres and tuned for real-time analytics and AI, Timescale Cloud ships ready for production scale. Three integrated tools help you focus on solving business challenges, instead of writing SQL code by hand.
Timescale Cloud delivers fast performance and improves developer velocity when working with your database. Use SQL Assistant to run analyses, and rely on Recommendations to alert you when your database needs tuning. Debug users or queries with Insights to identify and resolve performance issues.
SQL Assistant eliminates the need for manual SQL writing during ad hoc analysis, enabling faster incident response and reporting while lowering the barrier for team members who understand the data but lack SQL expertise. This dramatically accelerates the data exploration and query development process, reducing time spent writing and debugging SQL, and making sophisticated analysis accessible even to those less familiar with advanced SQL functions.
Timescale Cloud powers your customer-facing applications with high-performance time-series data, but its value extends beyond production environments. Many teams leverage our powerful analytics capabilities through read replicas that keep production performance unaffected while enabling deeper data exploration.
While Data Mode makes exploration and dashboarding accessible, extracting complex analytical insights still requires SQL expertise—until now. SQL Assistant with Agent Mode democratizes data access across your entire organization by allowing anyone to write questions in plain language, such as:
“Show me which customer segments experienced payment processing delays during peak trading hours yesterday.”
SQL Assistant converts that request into multi-step SQL, executes it against your read replica, and returns actionable insights. Your entire team can now analyze user behavior patterns, identify optimization opportunities, and make data-driven product decisions without writing a single line of SQL.
Agent Mode maintains context across follow-up questions, enabling natural exploration paths like "Now compare that to our free tier users" or "How is this trend over the past month?" without starting over.
SQL Assistant integrates several large language model (LLM) providers through a unified interface that abstracts away the differences between models. What makes it powerful is its suite of specialized tools:
factory_sensors and the exact column names for temperature readings.This dramatically accelerates the data exploration and query development process, reducing the time spent writing and debugging SQL, and making sophisticated analysis accessible even to those less familiar with advanced SQL functions. It simplifies getting insights from your fast database, letting you focus on your business rather than wrangling SQL.
While SQL Assistant empowers everyone on your team to extract valuable insights, maintaining optimal database performance requires ongoing attention. This is where our next feature becomes invaluable.
Recommendations provides expert-level database tuning without requiring expert hours. It prevents performance surprises in production with clear, actionable guidance for optimizing your database. This ensures your database stays optimized without creating a manual tuning backlog, giving you confidence that your system is running at peak efficiency with minimal effort.
Recommendations is Timescale’s way of sharing our expertise with you, so you can identify opportunities to tune your database as well as a database expert. Recommendations continually monitor your database for tuning opportunities, identifying optimizations that you may not even know existed.
The objective of Recommendations is to identify database improvements before you feel any negative performance impact. Recommendations are in their first phase, but we are consistently adding more to get expanded coverage of your database.
Example recommendations:
events has small chunks; increase chunk_interval to reduce overhead.”refresh_cagg_metrics has failed 10 times.”You apply—or dismiss—each suggestion with a click. Your database stays optimized without a manual tuning backlog.
For example, if your hypertable has too many chunks due to a suboptimal chunk size configuration, you’ll receive a recommendation to update it. Timescale Cloud will automatically recommend a new chunk interval for you to adopt, which you can adjust in one click, effectively resolving the issue going forward. This should dramatically improve your database performance for all future chunks. Soon, we will also provide a way to fix chunks retroactively, applying those performance gains to any existing chunks as well.
While Recommendations helps keep your database well-tuned, understanding exactly why certain queries are performing poorly requires deeper visibility—which is precisely what our Insights feature delivers.
Insights enables you to rapidly detect and fix performance regressions by instantly spotting when performance degrades and pinpointing the root cause. It helps you understand long-term performance through historical trend analysis to proactively identify optimization opportunities, and lets you confidently quantify the impact of schema changes, index additions, or query rewrites with comprehensive before-and-after performance data.
Database performance tuning can often feel like searching in the dark. You know a query is slow, but pinpointing why and how to fix it—and proving your fix worked—can be challenging. Standard tools like Postgres' pg_stat_statements offer a starting point by aggregating query statistics, but they often lack the depth needed for complex troubleshooting.
This is where Insights on Timescale Cloud elevates your monitoring and optimization capabilities. It goes far beyond basic statistics, providing the comprehensive visibility required to truly understand and enhance your database performance.
At its core, Insights works by continuously capturing rich, detailed information about your database's workload. It intelligently samples and collects crucial data points for analysis, including:
This detailed data is then processed and stored efficiently within Timescale Cloud itself. By collecting this granular information over time, Insights generates a significant volume of time-series performance data.
This is where the power of the Timescale platform shines: it's specifically architected to handle petabyte-scale time-series datasets with high ingest rates and efficient querying, making it uniquely suited to manage the wealth of data generated by Insights without impacting your primary workload. You can read more in our Insights launch blog post.
More than pg_stat_statements
While pg_stat_statements is a valuable tool included with PostgreSQL and offered by many cloud providers, Insights provides significantly richer context:
pg_stat_statements primarily offers aggregate statistics like execution time and call counts.Insights is a key piece to identifying performance bottlenecks in your database. It also represents how well Timescale scales, given that it runs on Timescale Cloud. See how we scaled Insights to 2 PB and collecting 1T metrics per day.
With these powerful features working together, Timescale Cloud offers a comprehensive solution that combines analysis capabilities, performance optimization, and deep visibility into your database health.
Scaling performance shouldn't mean scaling complexity. Timescale integrates these intelligent operational tools directly into the cloud platform you already trust.
Use SQL Assistant to query and investigate faster, getting business insights quickly.
Leverage Recommendations for automated tuning, ensuring you’re never missing an optimization.
Utilize Insights for clear query performance visibility and to easily debug any performance bottlenecks.
Together, these features give your analytics superpowers and help ensure your database and queries are always performing optimally, accelerating your developer velocity and giving you more confidence in managing your database.
Your applications are becoming more critical and data-intensive. Don't let operational complexity bottleneck your innovation. With Timescale, you get the speed demanded by modern workloads and the simplicity needed to operate efficiently. Consolidate your infrastructure, scale confidently, and free your team to focus on what matters most.
Want to experience performance without the operational pain? Create a free Timescale account and see how easy high-performance Postgres can be.
Tomorrow, we’ll pull back the curtain on the enterprise‑grade safeguards that let Toyota, Warner Music Group, and the Financial Times run mission-critical workloads on Timescale Cloud with complete peace of mind. See how built‑in encryption, SOC 2 Type II compliance, and private networking via AWS Transit Gateway keep your data locked down—without adding latency or extra infrastructure. Join us to learn why, with Timescale, speed and security travel together.