InfluxData Blog

There are other time series databases worth comparison with TimescaleDB: * InfluxDB - https://www.influxdata.com/ * VictoriaMetrics - https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/ * M3DB - https://github.com/m3db/m3/

InfluxData (YC W13) | San Francisco or Remote | https://www.influxdata.com/ | Golang | Full Time | REMOTE OK We're looking for database engineers to help work on InfluxDB and other products. The current InfluxDB team is spread across four timezones and two continents; we're definitely a remote-first company. If you love Go, open-source, writing high performance code and solving interesting data/distributed systems problems, then we want to hear from you. We're hiring for a number of roles: https://www.influxdata.com/careers/ No puzzles and technical interviews for us; if you're an exceptional Go candidate you'll probably stand out already with your previous work or software projects.

I run a whole bunch of different servers and apps in Docker on an old laptop with an i7 processor and 16GB RAM. One of my favourite self-hosted apps is WikiJs (https://wiki.js.org/). It takes a git repository of markdown files and turns it into an editable wiki and syncs back changes to the git repository. I also use InfluxDB with Chronograf and Telegraf (https://www.influxdata.com) to collect and analyse logs. It's not quite as full featured as Elastic or Prometheus but is easy to use, rock-solid and nice to look at. Plus they sent me a free pair of socks (all the way to NZ) for filling in a survey! :-) And to help manage all the Docker images I spin up and down, I use Portainer - https://portainer.io/ Forgot to add that just recently I've started to run Apache Guacamole to give me remote access to my local LAN while I'm not at home. This is so great - HTTPS access to RDP, VNC, and SSH sessions. https://guacamole.apache.org/

I know you said preferably Postgres based, but influxdb has strictly usage based pricing so that might be worth a look. Also you're an open source project and have tight budgetary constraints sometimes you can always ask for a discount, the worst they can say is no. https://www.influxdata.com/influxdb-cloud-pricing/

As of today, they announced a plan for open sourcing a version of v3, but they make it clear in the article that it won't be a great fit for every existing use case. https://www.influxdata.com/blog/the-plan-for-influxdb-3-0-open-source/

InfluxData | San Francisco, USA | Full Time | REMOTE | Multiple positions | https://www.influxdata.com/careers/ Come join the market leader in the fastest growing segment of the database industry (time series databases). We just completed our Series D funding round are are looking to hire technical support folks, product people, and sales engineers amongst roles. Check out https://www.influxdata.com and then feel free to email trevor@

It's got to be a rough day for the team at https://www.influxdata.com/ . This could become serious competition for their InfluxCloud hosted offering.

InfluxData | Software / Support Engineer, and almost every other position | SF | ONSITE/REMOTE | Full Time InfluxData makes the time series database InfluxDB, and related products. Our customers love us, we're growing fast, looking for curious humans to help us grow. Very remote-friendly (I'm remote). Golang, Javascript, Kubernetes, AWS - Developer Advocate - DevRel - Managers, Directors - Account Exec - Product Manager - SDR - SE - SWE - Golang, JS/React - Support Engineer - Tech Writer https://www.influxdata.com/careers/ or email me [email protected]

Great overview of the landscape. Any thoughts on Influx's upcoming release and its reduced memory footprint? https://www.influxdata.com/path-1-billion-time-series-influxdb-high-ca…

A time series database is an abstraction where a timestamp [1] is the key in the first order tables. Often the abstraction is built on top of some well known database because getting all the bits to write and read from storage is a hard problem where existing solutions exist. For example, Kairosis built on Cassandra [2] and OpenTSDB uses Hbase. [3]. It's not the only way to do it, InfluxDB uses its own back end. [4] [1] or a tuple of timestamp and some other values. [2] https://kairosdb.github.io/ [3] http://opentsdb.net/ [4] https://www.influxdata.com/

The only names I recognized on there was Influx and Compose. Influx actually looks like they use AWS for their cloud offering now: https://www.influxdata.com/announcing-influxcloud-fully-managed-influx… and Compose deploys to AWS, Google, Softlayer and only to D.O for MongoDB classic whatever that is: https://www.compose.com/mongodb

https://influxdata.com/ - purpose built DB for storing time series data.

Granted Influxdata needs to eat, which is fine--and it's a product worth paying for--but they handed us a choice between an unanticipated expense versus reevaluating the market when they changed business models after we had selected them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262318 https://influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clustering-high-availab…

For the TS experts out there, any real world experience with Influx? (https://influxdata.com/)

We're open to paying once we're rolling. It's more that you've so far only said "basic is $400" and it isn't clear what that means or what will drive people to "more than basic." It's hard to get suprised, and then be waiting for the "fool me twice" pricing to come. I've been a fan of your work since Typhoeus and that's part of why I was happy to bet on you making influx amazing. I just didn't see the pricing risk coming (maybe I should have). For our perspective, the pricing issue is scary because a load test can be high volume without the normal correlation to "really big enterprise business" that makes it a good way to price. Is the double-write architecture the nginx solution shown here? https://influxdata.com/high-availability/

There's nothing to stop somebody else from coming along and building a version with clustering support. Whether that will happen or not is, of course, an open question. Clustering is really really hard. My personal experience with that class of problem is that it took 3 years to get it production ready, and that was for a simpler problem than what needs to be solved here. The chances of a 3rd party implementing this given that InfluxData plan to have a commercial version seem very low. I'd expect that most companies who want to stay open source will treat this as a standard database that needs client-side sharding and HA (which is the recommend approach - see https://influxdata.com/high-availability/).

I have been using InfluxDB (for throwing data into) and Grafana (for displaying pretty charts of that data). It's pretty great. I had no idea InfluxData forked Grafana and developed their own (currently closed-source) visualization tool named Chronograf. It looks like a InfluxData branded version of Grafana. Also interesting is that it's the only closed-source element of their TICK stack. Seems like there could easily be a conflict of interest here, such as new features of InfluxData only working with Chronograf and not Grafana. grafana - http://grafana.org/ chronograf - https://influxdata.com/get-started/#visualizing-data-with-chronograf

InfluxDB 3 just went alpha, and they similarly have very severe limitations on what their open-core product will do, very strongly drive folks to upgrade to enterprise. https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdb3-open-source-public-alpha/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42684524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703113 While I admit that I don't think losing open source developers is actually that big a harm to many projects (there's just not enough people out there to drive by big valuable amazing features), I feel like the open core approach shuts yourself off from most people who are looking for open source solutions. The core is not enough. No one's going to be happy running a 500x slower python project knowing there's the real deal running elsewhere, with a hip new runtime they can't get. I recognize that for some of these companies, this probably is a necessary move. They need revenue to do what they do and it's hard to get revenue in open source. But these are both interesting products that I was hopeful for that I can't imagine adopting anymore. That's fine, I don't demand being served by anyone, but it is really sad to see, and I wonder how many awesome projects that would have grown big stop these technologies will never be created, because of these shifts. Matrix especially feels like a brutal loss, because we are so short of good communication systems. I regret not seeing DataFusion & Arrow being out to use & integrate on with InfluxDB 3 but at least…

The link to Slack in this post by "developer advocate" Jay Clifford is a rabbit hole worth diving into a bit: https://community.influxdata.com/t/getting-weird-results-from-gcp-euro… Find your way into that Slack workspace via https://www.influxdata.com/blog/introducing-our-new-influxdata-communi… and you'll discover some interesting things: * That the only reason being given in that thread for the shutdown is "The region did not get enough usage or growth to make it economically viable to operate, so it became necessary for InfluxData to discontinue service in those regions.". i.e. there's no regulatory issue here like other answers speculated - just pure cost-cutting. * That on July 5th, a couple of hours before they started shutting everything down (based on the shutdown timeline at https://status.influxdata.com/), that same "Developer Advocate" announced that they were suspending their live "office hours" sessions for July. * Multiple people are asking for help after finding that they can't connect and getting ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the way of support from the company. It's literally falling to _other users_ to tell them that all their data is gone. * One person chiming in, Matthew Allen, DID have a colleague who saw the notification email, but notes that... - it was a pain for him to migrate has data to a different region due to InfluxDB Cloud's rate limiting, but that he did it anyway - ... but that the documented migration…

The blog post series seems to bury the lede -- it isn't until part 3 [1] that we get to the insight that MQTT and Kafka solve different problems and therefore can have complementary roles in the same system. We use this architecture for IoT: MQTT for edge because it's standard and super good enough, and Kafka because it turns out we want to do more than one thing with the data as it streams in so not using Kafka would end up being more complicated. Here's a key insight though: for IoT you don't want to use an actual MQTT broker, like Mosquitto or HiveMQ. If you do, it's hard to avoid data loss. Server side you have something that subscribes to those MQTT topics and pushes the data into Kafka. What do you do when that thing needs to be restarted? Ok, you can use persistent sessions in your MQTT broker. But how much memory does your MQTT broker need? What if your MQTT broker crashes? Oops, now your MQTT broker needs its own persistent database to keep track of all those messages in limbo. What you want is an MQTT gateway -- something that looks like an MQTT broker to the devices, but the server side does something different with received messages. When it gets the MQTT PUBLISH command, it sends the message to Kafka, waits for the ack from Kafka, and only then sends PUBACK back. Presto, the MQTT thing is now stateless and horizontally scalable. Your clients just need some retry logic. Maybe Kafka's mqtt-proxy does this, I don't know. I don't think it's mentioned in part 3.…

So far working with Rust has been great. We haven't had to build any special build tooling. The build times are greater than Go, but we're able to keep things manageable by breaking the project into separate Crates (all still within the same repo and directory tree), which can take advantage of incremental compilation. Rust has the memory control we're looking for with the safety of a higher level language. For programming that requires concurrency, as most server software including this project does, it's fantastic as the compiler will prevent data races. The way Rust has you deal with errors also makes it easier to write correct code at compile time rather than finding problems at runtime when they can be harder to track down. Most of what I wrote here a few years ago still feels true: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/rust-can-be-difficult-to-learn-and-fru… I also talk about using Rust in the announcement blog post here: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/announcing-influxdb-iox/

I have been currently exploring the option of open sourcing a project of mine and have researched CLAs a bit, but would love to be corrected if mistaken. It is as simple - and it is not. You need to take care of special cases, like contributions from company employees in their free time (their company could still own rights to this work), people contributing other people's code (SO answers), patents and whatnot. Fortunately there are existing CLA agreements (Apache for instance). As for this being the social issue, I don't know yet how big a problem that is. It's never bothered me before, as I recognize that maintainer might want to take the project in another direction in the future and since I don't want to maintain it, I am just happy that they are doing it for me. I will use CLA for my project and if someone doesn't like it, it's fine too - I don't mind forks (if they are well maintained, I'll just switch to them ;), and if someone doesn't want to contribute because of this, I don't want their contribution to be in my code anyway, because it limits my options in the future. There's a new post today on HN [0] that presents options pretty nicely, and it is very aligned with the conclusions I came to. [0] https://www.influxdata.com/blog/its-time-for-the-open-source-community…

Super interesting! I’m curious how this differs from InfluxDB’s German strings implementation https://www.influxdata.com/blog/faster-queries-with-stringview-part-on…

The author was looking for an excuse to use Rust for something since 2018: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/rust-can-be-difficult-to-learn-and-fru… The rewrite started in 2020... they rationalize now, but it's pretty clear they just really wanted Rust and found the reasons they list later as a post-decision justification. Nothing wrong with that, if you don't mind risking the future of your business on a risky rewrite... though if I had a job working on the Go code base and my employer suddenly announced we should drop everything and start a rewrite, so go learn Rust, which has a much smaller job pool in my area as far as I can see, I guess I would've been really pissed off and would leave as fast as possible.

As is tradition, hosted service: https://www.influxdata.com/influxdb-pricing/ Basically either you manage it yourself, or you pay them to do Serverless/Dedicated/Clustered hosted setup for you.

If I'm reading this [0] right, there will be no a standalone OS influxdb 3.0 version. So there's no point in comparing. I also wonder if it would be allowed to publish benchmarks of ENT version by 3rd-parties. [0] https://www.influxdata.com/blog/the-plan-for-influxdb-3-0-open-source/

Yes, influxdb 3.0 uses a new columnar store engine (IOx) that offers "unbounded cardinality". See more at https://www.influxdata.com/blog/intro-influxdb-iox/ (Disclaimer: I work at InfluxData)

> I would be much more comfortable if they used something like Plausible for analytics Their intent is to migrate entirely away from Google to the San Francisco based InfluxData, which I guess is marginally better in some ways but seems to entirely miss the point of people's objections in spirit. Other than people's personal subjective trust of one US company over another, there's no inherent difference between Alphabet & InfluxData from a technical standpoint. InfluxData do collect IPs per https://www.influxdata.com/legal/privacy-policy/

InfluxDB's newest storage engine, optimized for time-series data, is built with Rust (https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdb-engine/)

Paul Dix earlier today: "We're announcing the release of InfluxDB IOx, the new core of the database written in #rustlang and built with #apachearrow. It delivers infinite cardinality, tiered data storage, SQL compatibility and so much more." Related: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdb-engine/