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Discussion on: Why I'm Learning ROS 2 as a Database Person

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Alexey Timin

There's a reason why TSBDs aren't widely used in robotics. Robots generate lots of heavy data, such as images, LiDAR and transformation trees. Although TimescaleDB is better than InfluxDB at handling BLOB data, can it efficiently process such large amounts of it?

In ROS applications, TSBDs are mostly used as part of an observability stack. However, most of the data ends up in rosbag/MCAP files, which are manually transferred for debugging in tools such as Foglove or Rerun.

At ReductStore, we're trying to improve this workflow by ingesting all types of robotics data and providing the option to export data back to rosbag/MCAP files, enabling engineers to continue using their existing tools.

Do you think that TimescaleDB could be used as a complete data backbone for robotics data?