News

Open Source InfluxDB 1.0 Time-Series Database Released

• By David Ramel
• September 9, 2016

InfluxData Inc. said its new open source InfluxDB time-series database -- just moved to version 1.0 -- was almost three years in the making.

Written in the Go programming language, InfluxDB 1.0 was designed to process time-series data with high availability and high performance requirements, the company said.

Although most popular in Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data analytics development, time-series databases have many other use cases, according to InfluxData.

"Time-series data is nothing more than a sequence of data points, typically consisting of successive measurements made from the same source over a time interval," the company says on its site. "Put another way, if you were to plot your points on a graph, one of your axes would always be time. For example, time-series data may be produced by sensors like weather stations or RFIDs, IT infrastructure components like apps, servers and network switches or by stock trading systems."

As it has been under development for nearly three years, InfluxDB is already being used in those and other use cases in many companies.

"As we announce the release today, there are tens of thousands of organizations around the globe using InfluxDB," co-founder and CTO Paul Dix said in a blog post yesterday. "They're using it to monitor their network infrastructure, security, container infrastructure, solar panels, agriculture, scientific experiments, user analytics, business intelligence, home automation and countless other specific use cases."

InfluxDB is part of the company's TICK stack, which the company claims is the first open source platform designed to handle time-series data at scale. It provides the "I" in TICK, which is also composed of the company's Telegraf (collects data), Chronograf (visualization and graphing) and Kapacitor (alerting, ETL, anomaly detection) offerings.

Yesterday, InfluxData also announced version 1.0 editions of Telegraf and Kapacitor, along with publishing another post claiming InfluxDB is 27x Faster vs MongoDB for Time-Series Workloads, just one of a series of benchmarking tests against Elasticsearch, Cassandra and other databases.

Along with the open source InfluxDB, the company also produces InfluxEnterprise, a commercial offering featuring high-availability deployments and scale out clustering that result in increased throughput.

Dix said the company committed to no more breaking HTTP API changes going forward in the development of future versions of InfluxDB, along with storage engine stability, additive changes and ongoing support.

"We have many improvements coming for the 1.x line of releases and we've already started on some of these," Dix said. "Generally, you can expect continued work on the open source and commercial versions. As a project we're known for our speed of iteration and we intend to keep up the pace. The only difference is that now we're committed to maintaining API contracts as you'd expect with Semantic Versioning."

Dix personally thanked six community developers for contributing to the project, which received help from more than 200 developers over the course of the past three years.

Version 1.0 editions of InfluxDB, Telegraf, Chronograf and Kapacitor are available for download here. Source code is available on GitHub.