What is TimescaleDB?

TimescaleDB is an open-source database designed to make SQL scalable for time-series data. For more information, see the Timescale website.

How to use this image

This image is based on the official Postgres docker image so the documentation for that image also applies here, including the environment variables one can set, extensibility, etc.

Starting a TimescaleDB instance

docker run -d --name some-timescaledb -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16

Then connect with an app or the psql client:

docker run -it --net=host -e PGPASSWORD=password --rm timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16 psql -h localhost -U postgres

You can also connect your app via port 5432 on the host machine.

If you are running your docker image for the first time, you can also set an environmental variable, TIMESCALEDB_TELEMETRY, to set the level of telemetry in the Timescale docker instance. For example, to turn off telemetry, run:

docker run -d --name some-timescaledb -p 5432:5432 -e TIMESCALEDB_TELEMETRY=off -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16

Note that if the cluster has previously been initialized, you should not use this environment variable to set the level of telemetry. Instead, follow the instructions in our docs to disable telemetry once a cluster is running.

If you are interested in the latest development snapshot of timescaledb there is also a nightly build available under timescaledev/timescaledb:nightly-pg16 (for PG 14, 15 and 16).

Notes on timescaledb-tune

We run timescaledb-tune automatically on container initialization. By default, timescaledb-tune uses system calls to retrieve an instance's available CPU and memory. In docker images, these system calls reflect the available resources on the host. For cases where a container is allocated all available resources on a host, this is fine. But many use cases involve limiting the amount of resources a container (or the docker daemon) can have on the host. Therefore, this image looks in the cgroups metadata to determine the docker-defined limit sizes then passes those values to timescaledb-tune.

To specify your own limits, use the TS_TUNE_MEMORY and TS_TUNE_NUM_CPUS environment variables at runtime:

docker run -d --name timescaledb -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -e TS_TUNE_MEMORY=4GB -e TS_TUNE_NUM_CPUS=4 timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16

To specify a maximum number of background workers, use the TS_TUNE_MAX_BG_WORKERS environment variable:

docker run -d --name timescaledb -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -e TS_TUNE_MAX_BG_WORKERS=16 timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16

To specify a maximum number of connections, use the TS_TUNE_MAX_CONNS environment variable:

docker run -d --name timescaledb -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -e TS_TUNE_MAX_CONNS=200 timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16

To not run timescaledb-tune at all, use the NO_TS_TUNE environment variable:

docker run -d --name timescaledb -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -e NO_TS_TUNE=true timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16