Timescale License Dilemma and Burden to Comply

[ozum]

As everybody interested knows, Timescale provides two licenses: a limited version with Apache 2.0 License and a full-featured version with Timescale License (TSL). Most valuable features (a.k.a. Community Features) are behind TSL.

Timescale's official licensing page explains:

Roughly speaking, as long as you are not offering TimescaleDB as a hosted Database-as-a-Service, you can use all Community features for free.

Currently, if you want to use a full-featured Timescale with Supabase, you have two options one option:

1. Self-host Supabase and add Timescale extension yourself.
2. Use the Timescale service and add Supabase yourself. (If possible!) Seems hard/impossible

I want to use the Supabase service (not self-host) and add a full-featured Timescale extension. Is there any way to do this? i.e.

• Is Supabase a database-as-a-service, and does TSL really apply to Supabase?
• Can we manually change our Timescale license to TSL as described here in Timescale forums. In that case it is not offered by Supabase and seems to comply with licensing terms (or not(?)).

As a last resort, I thought to subscribe to both Supabase and Timescale, divide my database by putting time-related parts into Timescale and the rest in Supabase, and access using a Foreign Data Wrapper or an API. As you guessed, this is not natural micro-service partitioning but architecture forced by legal licensing issues. Such a development burden...

I would appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.

[GaryAustin1]

Can't comment on your work a rounds, but Supabase has commented it can't host the extension. One dev comment here: https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/17108#discussioncomment-8392177

[servrox]

Wrote a thread about it + a proper solution! I used a github action to re-build the image.

https://x.com/servrox1337/status/2023679230530211958