How we made DISTINCT queries up to 8000x faster on PostgreSQL Table of contents
TimescaleDB 2.2.1, released today, includes “TimescaleDB Skip Scan”, our implementation of a technique to vastly improve query times for DISTINCT queries. Skip Scan works on PostgreSQL tables, TimescaleDB hypertables, and TimescaleDB distributed hypertables (which scale across machines in a multi-node cluster), achieving 26x-8000x faster queries in our tests.
Shout out to the engineers who worked on this feature: Sven Klemm, Joshua Lockerman, Nikhil Sontakke, and the entire team of reviewers and testers!
Finding the most recent data quickly
How many times in the last week have you used an application or queried data looking for the most recent value of something? Maybe you recently reviewed the latest stock or cryptocurrency price for each of your investments. Or, maybe you checked the latest On Base Percentage for all of your Fantasy Baseball team players.