Apache Pulsar VS TimescaleDB

Compare Apache Pulsar vs TimescaleDB and see what are their differences.

TimescaleDB

An open-source time-series SQL database optimized for fast ingest and complex queries. Packaged as a PostgreSQL extension. (by timescale)
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Apache Pulsar TimescaleDB
30 82
13,727 16,445
1.0% 1.6%
9.8 9.8
6 days ago 5 days ago
Java C
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Apache Pulsar

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Pulsar. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-10.
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    10 projects | dev.to | 10 Feb 2024
    Stream-processing platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda are specifically engineered to foster event-driven communication in a distributed system and they can be a great choice for developing loosely coupled applications. Stream processing platforms analyze data in motion, offering near-zero latency advantages. For example, consider an alert system for monitoring factory equipment. If a machine's temperature exceeds a certain threshold, a streaming platform can instantly trigger an alert and engineers do timely maintenance.
  • Apache Pulsar VS quix-streams - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 7 Dec 2023
  • Help finding open source Terraform configurations that are not educational projects or developer tools
    2 projects | /r/Terraform | 28 Sep 2023
    Edit: Here's a good example of what I'm looking for: https://github.com/apache/pulsar. It is a full application that happens to be deployed (or deployable) with Terraform, and the configuration files are available.
  • Kafka Is Dead, Long Live Kafka
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2023
    I am the founder of RisingWave (http://risingwave.com/), an open-source SQL streaming database. I am happy to see the launch of Warpstream! I just reviewed the project and here's my personal opinion:

    * Apache Kafka is undoubtedly the leading product in the streaming platform space. It offers a simple yet effective API that has become the golden standard. All streaming/messaging vendors need to adhere to Kafka protocol.

    * The original Kafka only used local storage to store data, which can be extremely expensive if the data volume is large. That's why many people are advocating for the development of Kafka Tiered Storage (KIP-405: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-405%3A...). To my best knowledge, there are at least five vendors selling Kafka or Kafka-compatible products with tiered storage support:

    -- Confluent, which builds Kora, the 10X Kafka engine: https://www.confluent.io/10x-apache-kafka/;

    -- Aiven, the open-source tiered storage Kafka (source code: https://github.com/Aiven-Open/tiered-storage-for-apache-kafk...

    -- Redpanda Data, which cuts your TCO by 6X (https://redpanda.com/platform-tco);

    -- DataStax, which commercializes Apache Pulsar (https://pulsar.apache.org/);

    -- StreamNative, which commercializes Apache Pulsar (https://pulsar.apache.org/).

    * WarpStream claims to be "built directly on top of S3," which I believe is a very aggressive approach that has the potential to drastically reduce costs, even compared to tiered storage. The potential tradeoff is system performance, especially in terms of latency. As new technology, WarpStream brings novelty, and definitely it also needs to convince users that the service is robust and reliable.

    * BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) is becoming the default option. Most of the vendors listed above offer BYOC, where data is stored in customers' cloud accounts, addressing concerns about data privacy and security.

    I believe WarpStream is new technology to this market, and and would encourage the team to publish some detailed numbers to confirm its performance and efficiency!

  • Analyzing Real-Time Movie Reviews With Redpanda and Memgraph
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 Jul 2023
    In recent years, it has become apparent that almost no production system is complete without real-time data. This can also be observed through the rise of streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, Redpanda, and RabbitMQ.
  • There are about Pulsar 10k users in Slack, but about 70 in this subreddit.
    1 project | /r/ApachePulsar | 22 Jun 2023
    It's colored black on the refreshed Apache Pulsar site. https://pulsar.apache.org/
  • Is anyone frustrated with anything about Prometheus?
    5 projects | /r/PrometheusMonitoring | 18 Jun 2023
  • Kafka alternatives
    6 projects | /r/apachekafka | 22 May 2023
  • Is Redpanda going to replace Apache Kafka?
    2 projects | /r/dataengineering | 7 May 2023
    So many tools out there, its just which one do you like, I guess. I like Kafka. Works for our environment and we have a few clusters. People have brought up Cribl to replace our kafka (havent really looked into Cribl and we also run NiFi). I have even heard https://pulsar.apache.org/ , which seems to be almost another flavor of Kafka.
  • Querying microservices in real-time with materialized views
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Apr 2023
    RisingWave is an open-source streaming database that has built-in fully-managed CDC source connectors for various databases, also it can collect data from other sources such Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, or Redpanda and it allows you to query real-time streams using SQL. You can get a materialized view that is always up-to-date.

TimescaleDB

Posts with mentions or reviews of TimescaleDB. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-11.
  • TimescaleDB: An open-source time-series SQL database
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2024
  • Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2023
    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.
  • How to setup Postgres master-master cluster.
    1 project | /r/sysadmin | 5 Sep 2023
    Offboard it to Postgres specialists like https://www.timescale.com/
  • How to Choose the Right MQTT Data Storage for Your Next Project
    8 projects | dev.to | 23 Jul 2023
    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.
  • Why does the presence of a large write-only table in a PostgreSQL database cause severe performance degradation?
    1 project | /r/PostgreSQL | 2 Jul 2023
    Have some experience with https://www.timescale.com in this context
  • Opinions and Suggestions for PostgreSQL Extension under Development
    3 projects | /r/PostgreSQL | 29 May 2023
    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.
  • I have to do about a million inserts on a table every day that is also under very frequent reads. How should I do that?
    1 project | /r/PostgreSQL | 20 May 2023
    There is Timescale.
  • Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 May 2023
    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

  • Help with timeseries data
    2 projects | /r/Database | 10 May 2023
    TimescaleDB is Postgres with extensions to automatically partition tables for fast processing of time series data.
  • Postgres for time-series data
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Pulsar and TimescaleDB you can also consider the following projects:

redpanda - Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!

ClickHouse - ClickHouse® is a free analytics DBMS for big data

Apache ActiveMQ - Mirror of Apache ActiveMQ

promscale - [DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.

Apache ActiveMQ Artemis - Mirror of Apache ActiveMQ Artemis

TDengine - TDengine is an open source, high-performance, cloud native time-series database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Cars, Industrial IoT and DevOps.

Apache Camel - Apache Camel is an open source integration framework that empowers you to quickly and easily integrate various systems consuming or producing data.

GORM - The fantastic ORM library for Golang, aims to be developer friendly

Apache RocketMQ - Apache RocketMQ is a cloud native messaging and streaming platform, making it simple to build event-driven applications.

temporal_tables - Temporal Tables PostgreSQL Extension

RocketMQ

pgbouncer - lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL