Comment by killme2008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by killme2008 | Hacker News Reader

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Hi there, I’m from the GreptimeDB team.

Thank you for giving GreptimeDB a shout-out—it means a lot to us. We created GreptimeDB to simplify the observability data stack with an all-in-one database, and we’re glad to hear it’s been helpful.

OpenTelemetry-native is a requirement, not an option, for the new observability data stack. I believe otel-arrow (https://github.com/open-telemetry/otel-arrow) has strong future potential, and we are committed to supporting and improving it.

FYI: I think SQL is great for building everything—dashboards, alerting rules, and complex analytics—but PromQL still has unique value in the Prometheus ecosystem. To be transparent, GreptimeDB still has some performance issues with PromQL, which we’ll address before the 1.0 GA.

> I think SQL is great for building everything

Are you saying that you prefer SQL over PromQL for metrics queries? I haven't tried querying metrics via SQL yet, but generally speaking have found PromQL to be one of the easier query languages to learn - more straightforward and concise IME. What advantages does SQL offer here?

I didn’t mean SQL over PromQL — they’re designed for different layers of problems. SQL has a broader theoretical scope: it’s a general-purpose language that can describe almost any kind of data processing or analytics workflow, given the right schema and functions.

PromQL, on the other hand, is purpose-built for observability — it’s optimized for time‑series data, streaming calculations, and real‑time aggregation. It’s definitely easier to learn and more straightforward when your goal is to reason about metrics and alerting.

SQL’s strengths are in relational joins, richer operator sets, and higher‑level abstraction, which make it more powerful for analytical use cases beyond monitoring. PromQL trades that flexibility for simplicity and immediacy — which is exactly what makes it great for monitoring.

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