Getting Started

A TimescaleDB database behaves in many respects like a standard PostgreSQL database. It:

• Coexists with other TimescaleDB databases and PostgreSQL databases on a PostgreSQL server.
• Uses SQL as its interface language.
• Contains standard database objects like tables, indexes, and triggers.
• Uses common PostgreSQL connectors to third-party tools.

The way the database accomplishes this synchronicity is through its packaging as a PostgreSQL extension, whereby a standard PostgreSQL database is transformed into a TimescaleDB database.

The advantages that TimescaleDB offers beyond that of PostgreSQL are primarily related to handling time-series data. These advantages are most easily seen when interacting with hypertables, which behave like normal tables yet maintain high performance even while scaling storage to normally prohibitive amounts of data. Hypertables can engage in normal table operations, including JOINs with standard tables.

Getting started with TimescaleDB involves a few steps:

1. Installing PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.
2. Creating a standard PostgreSQL database and enabling the TimescaleDB extension on the database.
3. Creating a hypertable to store your data.
4. Migrating your data to a hypertable (optional)
5. Setting up data node authentication for distributed hypertables