The Lab.

On the bench — things I install, break, and measure on real hardware. Every experiment is actually run: real load tests, real screenshots, a verdict at the end. When one hardens into a conviction, it graduates to writing.

Concluded

TimescaleDB · Docker · Grafana · PostgreSQL

TimescaleDB as a plant historian: a 40-million-row load test on a home lab

Three years of one-minute sensor data — 39.5 million rows — loaded into plain PostgreSQL and a TimescaleDB hypertable on the same box, then compressed, bucketed, and reported on. Real install, real numbers, real Grafana screenshots.

Verdict A hypertable pays a small ingest tax, then returns 3× the disk and reports that run 600–1000× faster.

23 Jul 2026 · 12 min read