Highlights in 2025

Significant progress on the TimescaleDB schema, backend, and test suite was achieved in 2025. The solution’s performance has been validated at the scale of large production deployments, with hundreds of simultaneous ingestion and querying processes. In all scenarios, it met or exceeded the requirements, even on moderately performant hardware.

To enable simple and efficient retrieval of historical data without requiring SQL knowledge, a dedicated API has been developed. Together with Grafana extensions – initially developed as part of an openlab Summer Student project – that allow users to browse and select signals using familiar table and tree views, this functionality addresses a long-standing need for creating rich and dynamic dashboards. These dashboards will simplify the daily work of hundreds of system experts, operators, and scientists at CERN.

To unlock the full benefits of the new archiving solution, data from existing Oracle schemas must be migrated to TimescaleDB. This represents a significant challenge, not only due to the scale – nearly 200 TB distributed across more than 350 schemas – but also because of the complex validation checks required to ensure full preservation of data integrity.