With this release, we are officially moving TimescaleDB 2.0 to GA,
concluding several release candidates.

TimescaleDB 2.0 adds the much-anticipated support for distributed
hypertables (multi-node TimescaleDB), as well as new features and
enhancements to core functionality to give users better clarity and
more control and flexibility over their data.

Multi-node architecture: In particular, with TimescaleDB 2.0, users
can now create distributed hypertables across multiple instances of
TimescaleDB, configured so that one instance serves as an access node
and multiple others as data nodes. All queries for a distributed
hypertable are issued to the access node, but inserted data and queries
are pushed down across data nodes for greater scale and performance.

Multi-node TimescaleDB can be self managed or, for easier operation,
launched within Timescale's fully-managed cloud services.

This release also adds:

• Support for user-defined actions, allowing users to define,
  customize, and schedule automated tasks, which can be run by the
  built-in jobs scheduling framework now exposed to users.
• Significant changes to continuous aggregates, which now separate the
  view creation from the policy. Users can now refresh individual
  regions of the continuous aggregate materialized view, or schedule
  automated refreshing via policy.
• Redesigned informational views, including new (and more general)
  views for information about hypertable's dimensions and chunks,
  policies and user-defined actions, as well as support for multi-node
  TimescaleDB.
• Moving all formerly enterprise features into our Community Edition,
  and updating Timescale License, which now provides additional (more
  permissive) rights to users and developers.

Some of the changes above (e.g., continuous aggregates, updated
informational views) do introduce breaking changes to APIs and are not
backwards compatible. While the update scripts in TimescaleDB 2.0 will
upgrade databases running TimescaleDB 1.x automatically, some of these
API and feature changes may require changes to clients and/or upstream
scripts that rely on the previous APIs. Before upgrading, we recommend
reviewing upgrade documentation at docs.timescale.com for more details.

Major Features

TimescaleDB 2.0 moves the following major features to GA:

• #1923 Add support for distributed hypertables
• #2006 Add support for user-defined actions
• #2125 #2221 Improve Continuous Aggregate API
• #2084 #2089 #2098 #2417 Redesign informational views
• #2435 Move enterprise features to community
• #2437 Update Timescale License

Previous Release Candidates

• #2702 Release Candidate 4 (December 2, 2020)
• #2637 Release Candidate 3 (November 12, 2020)
• #2554 Release Candidate 2 (October 20, 2020)
• #2478 Release Candidate 1 (October 1, 2020)

Minor Features

Since the last release candidate 4, there are several minor
improvements:

• #2746 Optimize locking for create chunk API
• #2705 Block tableoid access on distributed hypertable
• #2730 Do not allow unique index on compressed hypertables
• #2764 Bootstrap data nodes with versioned extension

Bugfixes

Since the last release candidate 4, there are several bugfixes:

• #2719 Support disabling compression on distributed hypertables
• #2742 Fix compression status in chunks view for distributed chunks
• #2751 Fix crash and cancel when adding data node
• #2763 Fix check constraint on hypertable metadata table

Thanks

Thanks to all contributors for the TimescaleDB 2.0 release:

• @airton-neto for reporting a bug in executing some queries with UNION
• @nshah14285 for reporting an issue with propagating privileges
• @kalman5 for reporting an issue with renaming constraints
• @LbaNeXte for reporting a bug in decompression for queries with
  subqueries
• @semtexzv for reporting an issue with continuous aggregates on
  int-based hypertables
• @mr-ns for reporting an issue with privileges for creating chunks
• @cloud-rocket for reporting an issue with setting an owner on
  continuous aggregate
• @jocrau for reporting a bug during creating an index with transaction
  per chunk
• @fvannee for reporting an issue with custom time types
• @ArtificialPB for reporting a bug in executing queries with
  conditional ordering on compressed hypertable
• @dutchgecko for reporting an issue with continuous aggregate datatype
  handling
• @lambdaq for suggesting to improve error message in continuous
  aggregate creation
• @francesco11112 for reporting memory issue on COPY
• @Netskeh for reporting bug on time_bucket problem in continuous
  aggregates
• @mr-ns for reporting the issue with CTEs on distributed hypertables
• @akamensky for reporting an issue with recursive cache invalidation
• @ryanbooz for reporting slow queries with real-time aggregation on
  continuous aggregates
• @cevian for reporting an issue with disabling compression on
  distributed hypertables

The music for this release was Synchroncity by The Police.