Hello everyone, I'm back from a long hiatus with something new for you to learn. Sorry it took so long, but I've been busy... And for all the new subscribers, you've now received a good reason why you subscribed to this newsletter:

Traditional databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite are great for developing our apps but they're optimized for CRUD-like operations to read a few specific rows. Once you're tasked with e.g. building a dasboard or execute any other statistical queries, you must be patient. Those queries take a long time. In many consulting calls, I've been asked on how to improve performance of these queries. So I knew something had to be done...

I've been a long-time fan and user of TimescaleDB which is a PostgreSQL extension that upgrades PostgreSQL to a fast database for time-based analytics. And anytime you need to calculate some statistics for a specific time range, I recommend to give TimescaleDB a try. The magic is that you just need to execute a few SQL queries to set it up and you're good to go. There's hardly anything new to learn at all - compared to the many complex analytics databases.

And the best of it? It's really fast: 466x faster than PostgreSQL and 966x faster than MySQL ( Benchmark ). How can it be so fast? One part is that TimescaleDB adds a different storage format (columnstore) to PostgreSQL that is optimized for analytics. And the other other part is that you can ask TimescaleDB to pre-compute queries for you and always keep them up-to-date with all changes. Without any effort!

I am in love with that database and I believe you will be too when learning how easy it is. Today, I've release the first two chapters and a new one will follow every four weeks from now on. So you can learn everything in your pace over time. Have fun!

Have you struggled in the past with slow analytics queries? I am happy to hear any stories from you - and also feedback on the course!

I hope you learn a lot
Tobias