How TimescaleDB helped us scale analytics and reporting

Cloudflare details why it chose TimescaleDB (a PostgreSQL extension) over ClickHouse to power analytics for its Digital Experience Monitoring and Zero Trust reporting, prioritizing simplicity and rapid delivery. Starting with PostgreSQL and precomputed aggregates, the team later adopted TimescaleDB hypertables, columnstore, compression, sparse minmax indexes, and continuous aggregates to achieve 5–35x query speedups and up to 33x storage reduction, enabling faster dashboards and longer retention with less operational complexity; other teams subsequently applied the same approach for large-scale reporting across Access, Gateway, CASB, and DLP.