How to benchmark time series workloads

When looking at multiple solutions for storing and analyzing large amounts of time series data, it's common to see many open source systems claim that they are the easiest to maintain or are the fastest and most efficient at storing and writing data. Reliable comparisons are one of the best ways for users to make the decision which system fits their needs in terms of resource usage, speed, ease of use and other requirements.

We decided to make it more transparent for developers to choose the right time series database by providing support for testing and measuring database performance that anyone can replicate.

While there are many ways to measure database performance, we saw the Time Series Benchmark Suite (TSBS) regularly coming up in discussions about time series databases and decided we should provide the ability to benchmark QuestDB along with other systems.

The TSBS is a collection of Go programs to generate datasets and then benchmark read and write performance. It was initially released by InfluxDB engineers and continuously improved by the TimescaleDB team. The suite is extensible so that different types of data and query types can be included and compared across systems.

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