berlin-shared-mobility-map VS TimescaleDB

Hello HN!

Over the last year, I crawled and stored the position of all available bicycles of a large shared mobility provider in Berlin, Germany once a minute (~2.1 billion data points). Subsequently, I calculated 713,562 trip routes as they were likely taken by customers of the provider. The web app linked above provides more background information and visualizes some patterns I find interesting.

All 3D map layers are implemented with deck.gl (https://deck.gl) and projected on a MapLibre base map (https://maplibre.org). The base map uses self-hosted OpenMapTiles vector tiles (https://openmaptiles.org). I store all data inside a Timescale/PostgreSQL database (https://www.timescale.com) and perform most transformations via standard SQL. All of this is self-hosted on my bare-metal server at Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com).

The source code and a short demo video is available on GitHub: https://github.com/laurids-reichardt/berlin-shared-mobility-...

I’d love to receive feedback and answer your questions!

DISCLAIMER: Searching for collaboration opportunities for my master thesis.

I'm currently completing my master’s degree at HTW Berlin and would like to collaborate with an innovative company on an exciting problem or business case for my master thesis. I’m open to both remote work or on-site in Berlin.

If you could imagine providing an exciting opportunity in the fields of data engineering or data analytics, or have a tip who might, I'd love to get in touch with you via any of the contacts listed below.

Alternatively, leave a comment with your e-mail or contacts, and I’ll send you a message.

E-Mail: [email protected]

Don't forget PostgreSQL extensions. For something like a chat log, TimescaleDB (https://www.timescale.com/) can be surprisingly efficient. It will handle partitioning for you, with additional features like data reordering, compression, and retention policies.

Offboard it to Postgres specialists like https://www.timescale.com/

TimescaleDB{:target="_blank"}: an extension of PostgreSQL that adds time-series capabilities to the relational database model. It provides scalability and performance optimizations for handling large volumes of time-stamped data while maintaining the flexibility of a relational database.

Have some experience with https://www.timescale.com in this context

What about getting in touch with commercial organisations that have products/services based on PostgreSQL? For example Timescale, EDB, and Citus Data, or really any hosting provider that offers a managed PostgreSQL service.

There is Timescale.

Friends don't let their friends choose Mysql :)

A super long time ago (decades) when I was using Oracle regularly I had to make a decision on which way to go. Although Mysql then had the mindshare I thought that Postgres was more similar to Oracle, more standards compliant, and more of a real enterprise type of DB. The rumor was also that Postgres was heavier than MySQL. Too many horror stories of lost data (MyIsam), bad transactions (MyIsam lacks transaction integrity), and the number of Mysql gotchas being a really long list influenced me.

In time I actually found out that I had underestimated one of the most important attributes of Postgres that was a huge strength over Mysql: the power of community. Because Postgres has a really superb community that can be found on Libera Chat and elsewhere, and they are very willing to help out, I think Postgres has a huge advantage over Mysql. RhodiumToad [Andrew Gierth] https://github.com/RhodiumToad & davidfetter [David Fetter] https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfetter are incredibly helpful folks.

I don't know that Postgres' licensing made a huge difference or not but my perception is that there are a ton of 3rd party products based on Postgres but customized to specific DB needs because of the more liberalness of the PG license which is MIT/BSD derived https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

Some of the PG based 3rd party DBs:

Enterprise DB https://www.enterprisedb.com/ - general purpose PG with some variants

Greenplum https://greenplum.org/ - Data warehousing

Crunchydata https://www.crunchydata.com/products/hardened-postgres - high security Postgres for regulated environments

Citus https://www.citusdata.com - Distributed DB & Columnar

Timescale https://www.timescale.com/

Why Choose PG today?

If you want better ACID: Postgres

If you want more compliant SQL: Postgres

If you want more customizability to a variety of use-cases: Postgres using a variant

If you want the flexibility of using NOSQL at times: Postgres

If you want more product knowledge reusability for other backend products: Postgres

TimescaleDB is Postgres with extensions to automatically partition tables for fast processing of time series data.