What is Amazon Timestream?
Amazon Timestream is a serverless time series database optimized for storing and analyzing time series data. The service processes trillions of events per day and makes queries up to 1,000 times faster than relational databases at a fraction of the cost.
Timestream solves the challenge of efficiently storing and querying large volumes of time-based data. Traditional databases are not optimized for time series workloads and require extensive tuning or partitioning.
Core Features
- Automatic tiered storage from memory to magnetic
- SQL-based queries with time series functions
- Serverless with automatic scaling
- Built-in analytics functions like interpolation and forecasting
- Native integration with Grafana, QuickSight, and Jupyter
Typical Use Cases
IoT Telemetry: Storage of sensor data from thousands of devices with queries like “average temperature per device in the last hour” or real-time anomaly detection.
DevOps Metrics: Collection of infrastructure and application metrics for dashboards and alerting. Integration with CloudWatch, Prometheus, or custom metrics systems.
Application Analytics: Tracking user behavior, click paths, or business metrics over time with simple SQL queries for trends and patterns.
Benefits
- 1,000x faster queries than relational databases
- Automatic data management without manual partitioning
- Pay-per-use without capacity planning
- 10x cheaper than relational databases for time series
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon Timestream: data modeling for time series, migration from InfluxDB or other time series databases, dashboard development, and integration into existing monitoring solutions.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I use Timestream instead of DynamoDB?
Timestream is optimized for time series data with continuous write load and time-based queries. DynamoDB is better suited for transactional workloads with key-value access. For IoT sensor data, metrics, or log data, Timestream is usually the better choice.
How does tiered storage work?
Timestream stores new data in the memory store for fast queries (data up to hours old). Older data is automatically moved to the magnetic store, which is cheaper but has slightly higher latency. The transition time is configurable.
What query language does Timestream use?
Timestream uses SQL with time series specific functions like interpolation, smoothing, and forecasting. The syntax is familiar to SQL-experienced developers but offers specialized functions for time series analysis.
How do I integrate IoT data?
IoT Core can write data directly to Timestream via Rules. Alternatively, you can use Kinesis Data Streams or the Timestream Write API. The service supports batch writes for high throughput.