How do I start a Tiger Cloud trial on TigerData and create my first Postgres service?

Most teams evaluating Tiger Cloud follow the same basic path: sign up for a trial, spin up a Postgres service, then point an app or script at it and start pushing live data. This guide walks you through that flow end to end so you can get to your first query fast—without guessing which knobs matter.

Quick Answer: Tiger Cloud is TigerData’s managed Postgres platform powered by TimescaleDB, built for time-series, events, and real-time analytics. You start a trial by creating a TigerData account, setting up a project, and provisioning a free or standard Tiger Cloud service—your first Postgres instance—directly from the Tiger Cloud Console.

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The Quick Overview

• What It Is: A managed Postgres service with TimescaleDB that makes it easy to run time-series, event, and vector workloads at scale—without leaving SQL or stitching multiple systems together.
• Who It Is For: Developers, data engineers, and operators who want “plain Postgres” semantics (SQL, drivers, tooling) with real-time analytics performance, automatic partitioning, and lakehouse integration.
• Core Problem Solved: Plain Postgres becomes slow and expensive under high-ingest telemetry workloads and multi-system pipelines. Tiger Cloud gives you a single, optimized Postgres instance that stays fast as your tables and history grow.

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How It Works

Tiger Cloud organizes your environment into three main building blocks:

• Account & Console: Your TigerData login and the Tiger Cloud Console where you manage projects, services, usage, and billing.
• Projects: Logical containers for one or more services (often mapped to environments like “dev,” “staging,” “prod,” or to products/teams).
• Services: Fully managed Postgres+TimescaleDB instances. Each service hosts one database, with HA, backups, retention, and performance controls managed for you.

Once you start a Tiger Cloud trial, you’ll:

1. Create or join a project in the Console.
2. Provision a service (your first Postgres instance) with a few clicks.
3. Connect via psql, an app, or a BI tool using standard Postgres credentials and start ingesting telemetry or application data.

Under the hood, Tiger Cloud services are single optimized Postgres instances extended with TimescaleDB primitives (hypertables, compression, analytics, tiered storage). You keep Postgres-native access (SQL, drivers, pg tools) while gaining time-series performance and live analytics capabilities.

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Step-by-Step: Start a Tiger Cloud Trial and Create Your First Service

1. Sign up for TigerData and access the Tiger Cloud Console

1. Visit tigerdata.com.
2. Click Get Started or Tiger Cloud to open the signup flow.
3. Create an account with your work email or SSO (if available).
4. Confirm your email if prompted and log into the Tiger Cloud Console.

The Console is where you’ll see:

• Your projects and services
• Performance metrics and query insights
• Usage and cost visibility (with transparent, itemized billing)
• Security and access controls

Note: Trials typically include access to free services with limited resources and features, plus the ability to spin up standard services depending on your plan and region availability.

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2. Create or select a project

After logging in:

1. In the Console sidebar, locate Projects.
2. Either:
   • Create a new project (recommended for your trial), or
   • Join an existing project if a teammate invites you.

A project is a logical grouping of services, users, and usage. Most teams map projects to:

• mycompany-dev
• mycompany-staging
• mycompany-prod

For a trial, a single sandbox or pilot project is enough.

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3. Create your first Tiger Cloud Postgres service

With a project selected:

1. Click Create service (or similar “New service” button).

2. Choose a service type:

   • Free service
     • Zero cost, limited CPU/RAM/storage.
     • Ideal for quick evaluation and basic workloads.
   • Standard service
     • More powerful instance with higher limits.
     • Recommended if you want to test realistic ingest rates or heavier analytics queries.

3. Specify service details:

   • Service name: e.g., telemetry-dev, trading-sandbox.
   • Region: Choose the closest available region to reduce latency and keep data residency aligned with your needs.
   • Plan/size: Select the baseline CPU/RAM profile that matches your expected workload. You can adjust this later as you observe performance.

4. Confirm and create the service.

Within a short time, you’ll see the service status move to Running. At this point, Tiger Cloud has:

• Provisioned a single optimized Postgres instance.
• Installed and configured TimescaleDB.
• Enabled automated backups and point-in-time recovery (per plan).
• Applied baseline security (encryption in transit and at rest).

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4. Retrieve connection details and connect via Postgres tools

Open your newly created service in the Console. You’ll see:

• Hostname / URL
• Port
• Database name (typically a default database created for you)
• Username
• Password or connection secret
• Connection URI (copy/paste style for apps and tools)

You can now connect using standard Postgres clients:

Example: connect with psql

From your terminal:

psql "postgres://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOSTNAME:PORT/DATABASE?sslmode=require"

Or by specifying flags:

psql \
  --host=HOSTNAME \
  --port=PORT \
  --username=USERNAME \
  --dbname=DATABASE \
  "sslmode=require"

Important: Tiger Cloud encrypts connections in transit (TLS 1.2+). Ensure sslmode=require (or stricter) is set in your connection parameters.

Once connected, you are in a fully managed Postgres+TimescaleDB environment:

SELECT version();
SELECT extname, extversion FROM pg_extension WHERE extname = 'timescaledb';

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5. Create your first hypertable and store time-series data

To see the TimescaleDB capabilities in action, create a basic telemetry schema and hypertable:

-- 1. Create a relational table for time-series data
CREATE TABLE metrics (
    time        timestamptz       NOT NULL,
    device_id   text              NOT NULL,
    metric_name text              NOT NULL,
    value       double precision  NOT NULL,
    tags        jsonb             NULL
);

-- 2. Convert it to a hypertable for automatic partitioning
SELECT create_hypertable('metrics', 'time', chunk_time_interval => interval '1 day');

Now insert a few rows:

INSERT INTO metrics (time, device_id, metric_name, value, tags)
VALUES
  (now(), 'device-1', 'temperature', 23.4, '{"location": "lab"}'),
  (now(), 'device-2', 'temperature', 21.1, '{"location": "lab"}'),
  (now(), 'device-1', 'humidity',    43.8, '{"location": "lab"}');

Query with plain SQL:

SELECT
  device_id,
  metric_name,
  avg(value) AS avg_value
FROM metrics
WHERE time > now() - interval '1 hour'
GROUP BY device_id, metric_name
ORDER BY device_id, metric_name;

You’re already using Tiger Cloud as “Postgres for live telemetry data”: standard SQL, with automatic time partitioning and time-series awareness under the hood.

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Features & Benefits Breakdown

Core Feature	What It Does	Primary Benefit
Single optimized Postgres instance	Runs Postgres with TimescaleDB optimizations for time-series, events, and analytics.	Keep Postgres semantics and tooling while scaling telemetry workloads.
Hypertables & time-series functions	Adds automatic time/key-based partitioning and 200+ time-series SQL functions.	Faster reads/writes, simpler schema design, and rich analytics without extra systems.
Managed operations (Tiger Cloud)	Provides HA, automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and monitoring.	Reduce operational burden; focus on application logic, not cluster maintenance.

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Ideal Use Cases

• Best for real-time telemetry and metrics ingestion:
  Because Tiger Cloud combines hypertables, compression, and analytics-friendly storage to ingest high-volume time-series data while keeping queries fast over both fresh and historical windows.

• Best for mixed transactional + analytics workloads:
  Because you can run operational Postgres workloads (OLTP) alongside time-series analytics and even vector search in a single database, without fragile streaming glue or a separate lakehouse just to keep history queryable.

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Limitations & Considerations

• Free service resource limits:
  Free services are designed for evaluation and small workloads. CPU, memory, and storage are capped, and certain features may be limited. For realistic performance tests or production-like load, plan to use a standard service.

• Plan-dependent compliance & HA features:
  SOC 2 Type II reports, HIPAA compatibility, and certain high-availability options are available on specific plans (for example, Enterprise for HIPAA). Review the Tiger Cloud plan details to ensure your trial environment mirrors your target compliance posture.

Warning: Don’t treat a free trial service as a production environment. While it benefits from the same security posture (encryption at rest and in transit, private networking options by plan), you should move production workloads to an appropriate paid plan with HA and support SLAs.

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Pricing & Plans

Tiger Cloud plans are structured around services, not per-query fees. You pay for the instance resources you provision—compute, memory, and storage—with:

• No per-query charges
• No extra charges for automated backups
• Transparent, itemized billing, typically billed monthly in arrears.

Within this model:

• Free Service:
  Best for individual developers or small teams needing a zero-cost sandbox to evaluate Tiger Cloud, TimescaleDB features, and simple workloads.

• Standard Service (Performance/Scale/Enterprise tiers):
  Best for teams needing higher ingest rates, real-time analytics, HA, and compliance guarantees. Choose the tier based on your SLAs (uptime, response times, support severity handling) and regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, HIPAA).

Note: Exact resource sizes, region availability, and price points may change. Always refer to the pricing section in the Tiger Cloud Console or the TigerData pricing page for current details.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to create a Tiger Cloud Postgres service?

Short Answer: Usually just a few minutes from clicking “Create service” to having a running Postgres instance.

Details:
When you create a service, Tiger Cloud provisions a single optimized Postgres instance, installs TimescaleDB, configures security (TLS, encryption at rest), and enables operational safeguards (automated backups, monitoring). For most regions and plans, this process completes in a few minutes. You’ll see the service status change to Running in the Console, at which point you can copy connection details and start using psql or your application.

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Can I connect existing Postgres clients and tools to my Tiger Cloud trial?

Short Answer: Yes. Any Postgres-compatible client, driver, or BI tool can connect using the provided connection string.

Details:
Tiger Cloud is Postgres at its core. You connect using the host, port, database, username, and password shown in the Console. This means:

• Standard CLI tools (psql, pg_dump, pg_restore) work out of the box.
• Application drivers (Node, Python, Go, Java, etc.) use their usual Postgres connection strings.
• BI and analytics tools that support Postgres can connect directly.

The only requirement is to enable SSL/TLS (for example, sslmode=require). Once connected, you can create schemas, tables, indexes, and TimescaleDB objects (hypertables, continuous aggregates) exactly as you would in a self-managed Postgres instance—just with Tiger Cloud managing the underlying infrastructure.

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Summary

Starting a Tiger Cloud trial on TigerData and creating your first Postgres service is straightforward:

1. Sign up and access the Tiger Cloud Console.
2. Create a project to organize your environment.
3. Provision a free or standard Tiger Cloud service.
4. Connect using standard Postgres tools and drivers.
5. Create hypertables and begin ingesting live telemetry or application data.

You get the boring, reliable foundation of Postgres, extended with TimescaleDB’s primitives for time-series and real-time analytics, and backed by managed operations: HA, backups, point-in-time recovery, and a transparent pricing model with no per-query fees.

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Next Step

Get Started