In a way I guess this makes sense because they are not just doing time series anymore but on the other hand that is just a very strange name. I'm just thinking about Tiger Beetle and I'm sure they will lose so much in brand awareness because people have heard about timescale db but they have not heard about tiger data and the name just sounds so cheesy.
> There are no more “SQL vs. NoSQL” debates. MongoDB, Cassandra, InfluxDB, and other NoSQL databases are seen as technical dead ends. Snowflake and Databricks are acquiring PostgreSQL companies. No one talks about Hadoop. The Lakehouse has won.
That's quite some statement. Boy, would I have loved to live in a world where marketing rhetoric and scientific opinion were easier to distinguish.
Timescale is a much cooler name. Also heres a conversation I just had with Jippity. There are some nicer names imo.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6852de93-1384-8004-ac63-4ae93a8373...
Whenever I see a news headline mentioning that one of my critical dependencies is undergoing changes that make no technical sense, I get real fear. I feel like Jon Snow facing the army, as if I can see a tidal wave of devops work and code fixes coming my way. I really hope that these infrastructure product teams can be considering and not change something that is working well just for the sake of it. Even if they did a really smooth job, that sense of fear itself is a hurt to the brand - making me feel that this product is a source of fear.
This makes a certain amount of sense because it seems like the actual timescale DB extension/support/etc. they offer is becoming exponentially less important to their company as a result of their pgvectorscale offering. (I'm sure the post says as much.)
I did some work using pgvectorscale and their hosted offering a few months back and the product and the team were a delight to work with. I wish TigerData well.
We've been using TimescaleDB/TigerData for over five years now and it has proven to be a reliable component of our project. We process and store hundreds of data points for a six-digit number of industrial robots and TimescaleDB is what makes that possible. While I can't speak for Timescale Cloud, the managed service for TimescaleDB on Azure has been rock solid.
One annoying thing is that tiered storage is not available on their Azure offering, and also in general it feels like managed service for TimescaleDB is the unloved stepchild of their offering.
But yes, I hope the team continues their amazing work, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the project develops in the future.
So there’s TigerData and TigerBeetle. I wish they would have chosen a different fast cat…
So we do have Tiger management, Tiger base, Tiger Systems. Now with Tiger data if they all combine we may have a TigerDBMS.
My experiences with Timescale revealed the need for a full time DBA expert of TSDB to make the db viable for queries exceeding more than the last week of time series data. Tiered reads barely work at all. Do you want a degree in how to use a crippled Postgres offshoot?
> When we started 8 years ago, SQL databases were “old fashioned.” NoSQL was the future. Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, InfluxDB – these were the new, exciting NoSQL databases. PostgreSQL was old and boring.
In 2017? I thought the NoSQL hype had subsided by then and everyone was excited about distributed transactions -- Spanner, Cockroach, Fauna, Foundation, etc.
TigerData is bold, fast, and built to power the next era of software.
We already have a Tiger-themed database at home: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetleSlightly off-topic perhaps. For my use case (both short-term and long-term storage of sensors and metrics of a small Home Assistant instance) it probably doesn't matter, but what could someone recommend? ClickHouse looks kind of neat and it doesn't appear to be difficult to admin.
Timescale is much better
TIL you can have GIFs as the `og:image` and Slack and friends will render them as GIFs, actually wild
BTW there is another TigerData which predates this rename by a month: https://library.princeton.edu/about/library-news/2025/introd...
I've been using TimescaleDB for a while as a metrics datastore. It's really proven to be great for aggregating data without a lot of hassle (using continuous aggregates, retention policies, etc).
I recommend it when you don't want/need to have separate sources for account data and your metrics/aggregate data.
IMHO, the bigger name conflict is with Tigris Data. Tigris means tiger and despite no tiger logo, they did have tiger stickers at events
> "Our cloud offering is “Tiger Cloud.” Our logo stays the same: the tiger, looking forward, focused and fast. Some things do not change. Our open source time-series PostgreSQL extension remains TimescaleDB. Our vector extension is still pgvectorscale."
Cool!
At first I thought they were sold and the new owner didn't like the original name, but it doesn't seem to be the case. I don't really understand, why would somebody change a recognizable brand.
well at least they didn't append "AI" to their name
> InfluxDB, and other NoSQL databases are seen as technical dead ends.
Is influxdb really seen as a dead end?
I met these folks one time in NYC, you could tell they were onto something big & bigger.
Why not TigerScale ?
Literally last week I was looking at the logo and was like interesting they didn't go with a name using Tiger, Cheetah, etc. Cool name, though I must say Timescale was really cool name as well.
Bad choice imo, given that there is another database called tiger beetle. I assumed they’d merged when I saw the title.
Missed opportunity for the AI pivot: Taiger Data. I'll see myself out.
Which has nothing to do with WiredTiger I guess?
I talked to the timescale CTO at pg conf a few years ago and asked him what timescale does differently than a standard columnar database that makes it better suited for time oriented data. He said a bunch of things and I said “but columnar databases do those things.” Then he got mad at me.
I guess it’s just another columnar dbms after all?
"Why “Tiger”? The tiger has been our mascot since 2017, symbolizing the speed, power, and precision we strive for in our database. Over time, it’s become a core part of our culture: from weekly “Tiger Time” All Hands and monthly “State of the Tiger” business reviews, to welcoming new teammates as “tiger cubs” to the “jungle.”
Cringe...!!!
Copying what I viewed as the key parts:
> The majority of workloads on our Cloud product aren’t time-series. Companies are running entire applications on us... So we are now “TigerData.” We offer the fastest PostgreSQL. ... Our cloud offering is “Tiger Cloud.” Our logo stays the same: the tiger, looking forward, focused and fast... Our open source time-series PostgreSQL extension remains TimescaleDB. Our vector extension is still pgvectorscale. Why “Tiger”? The tiger has been our mascot since 2017, symbolizing the speed, power, and precision we strive for in our database.
Given the logo (and internal company culture around the tiger mascot), I understand where they're coming from, but with the name conflicts (TigerBeetle, WiredTiger, etc) I do wish they'd chosen something else -- like maybe TiScaleDB and give a titanium sheen, do triple duty with the tiger and the Timescale heritage?
> “While I appreciate PostgreSQL every day, am I the only one who thinks this is a rather bad idea?” – top HackerNews comment on our launch (link)
I know it's popular to bash the HackerNews hivemind, and often it's honestly deserved, but this line is in bad taste. The comment was not only polite and professional, it was also right. They had to introduce a columnar storage format (hypertables) to make it work. That is exactly what the comment and the follow-up cocmment suggest.
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Choosing a name like that made me think they were acquired by TigerBeetle. Come on like
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Tiger here, let's go!
going to be super confusing that there is now tigerdata and tigergraph - both database companies