Install TimescaleDB on Windows

Timescale Cloud: Performance, Scale, Enterprise

Self-hosted products

MST

TimescaleDB is a PostgreSQL extension for time series and demanding workloads that ingest and query high volumes of data.

This section shows you how to:

Install and configure TimescaleDB on PostgreSQL: set up a self-hosted PostgreSQL instance to efficiently run TimescaleDB.
Add the TimescaleDB extension to your database: enable TimescaleDB features and performance improvements on a database.

Development and production environments

The following instructions are for development and testing installations. For a production environment, we strongly recommend that you implement the following, many of which you can achieve using PostgreSQL tooling.

Incremental backup and database snapshots, with efficient point-in-time recovery.
High availability replication, ideally with nodes across multiple availability zones.
Automatic failure detection with fast restarts, for both non-replicated and replicated deployments.
Asynchronous replicas for scaling reads when needed.
Connection poolers for scaling client connections.
Zero-down-time minor version and extension upgrades.
Forking workflows for major version upgrades and other feature testing.
Monitoring and observability.

Deploying for production? With a Timescale Cloud service we tune your database for performance and handle scalability, high availability, backups and management so you can relax.

Try for free

Prerequisites

To install TimescaleDB on your Windows device, you need:

OpenSSL v3.x
For TimescaleDB v2.14.1 only, you need to install OpenSSL v1.1.1.
Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015

Install and configure TimescaleDB on PostgreSQL

This section shows you how to install the latest version of PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB on a supported platform using the packages supplied by Timescale.

Warning

If you have previously installed PostgreSQL without a package manager, you may encounter errors following these install instructions. Best practice is to full remove any existing PostgreSQL installations before you begin.

To keep your current PostgreSQL installation, Install from source.

Install the latest version of PostgreSQL and psql
1. Download PostgreSQL, then run the installer.
  1. In the Select Components dialog, check Command Line Tools, along with any other components you want to install, and click Next.
  2. Complete the installation wizard.
2. Check that you can run pg_config. If you cannot run pg_config from the command line, in the Windows Search tool, enter system environment variables. The path should be C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\<version>\bin.
Install TimescaleDB
1. Unzip the TimescaleDB installer to <install_dir>, that is, your selected directory.
  Best practice is to use the latest version.
2. In <install_dir>\timescaledb, right-click setup.exe, then choose Run as Administrator.
3. Complete the installation wizard.
  If you see an error like could not load library "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/17/lib/timescaledb-2.17.2.dll": The specified module could not be found., use Dependencies to ensure that your system can find the compatible DLLs for this release of TimescaleDB.
Tune your PostgreSQL instance for TimescaleDB
Run the timescaledb-tune script included in the timescaledb-tools package with TimescaleDB. For more information, see configuration.
Login to PostgreSQL as postgres
```
sudo -u postgres psql
```
You are in the psql shell.
Set the password for postgres
```
\password postgres
```
When you have set the password, type \q to exit psql.

Add the TimescaleDB extension to your database

For improved performance, you enable TimescaleDB on each database on your self-hosted PostgreSQL instance. This section shows you how to enable TimescaleDB for a new database in PostgreSQL using psql from the command line.

Connect to a database on your PostgreSQL instance
In PostgreSQL, the default user and database are both postgres. To use a different database, set <database-name> to the name of that database:
```
psql -d "postgres://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<database-name>"
```

Add TimescaleDB to the database


CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS timescaledb;

Check that TimescaleDB is installed

\dx

You see the list of installed extensions:


List of installed extensions
Name     | Version |   Schema   |                                      Description                                      
-------------+---------+------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
plpgsql     | 1.0     | pg_catalog | PL/pgSQL procedural language
timescaledb | 2.17.2  | public     | Enables scalable inserts and complex queries for time-series data (Community Edition)

Press q to exit the list of extensions.

And that is it! You have TimescaleDB running on a database on a self-hosted instance of PostgreSQL.

Where to next

What next? Try the main features offered by Timescale, see the use case tutorials, interact with the data in your Timescale Cloud service using your favorite programming language, integrate your Timescale Cloud service with a range of third-party tools, plain old Use Timescale, or dive into the API.

Supported platforms

The latest TimescaleDB releases for PostgreSQL are:
TimescaleDB is supported on the following platforms:
- Microsoft Windows 10
- Microsoft Windows 11
- Microsoft Windows Server 2019
- Microsoft Windows Server 2022

For release information, see the GitHub releases page and the release notes.