Core, the new open source InfluxDB offering, promises enhanced performance and more freedom in using it under a permissive license.

We've looked at Influx indirectly in the past through Amazon's
Timestream, the fully-managed time series database service that is based on open source InfluxDB. In that article we also gave a formal definition of time-series :

A time series is a sequence of data points reported at a consistent interval over time

Some common use cases of a time-series database are:

• Monitoring sensor data
• Server monitoring
• Application performance monitoring
• Network monitoring
• Financial market and trading analytics
• Behavioral analytics

Example of practically applied are:

• Walmart by analyzing sales data, can guess future demand
• Netflix analyzes several data points while a member is viewing a title, which are stored as viewing records to provide real time accurate bookmarks and personalized recommendations.
• E-commerce platforms use live customer interactions to adjust promotions.

The news is that InfluxDB 3 Core, open sourced product as dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2, along with InfluxDB 3 Enterprise have been released in Alpha status.
In essence Core is a rebuilt of Influx open source in order to deliver higher performance, real-time querying and fast ingestion amongst other features.

Because Core enables queries against the last 72 hours of data, it's optimized against the leading edge time series data as well as analytic queries, achieving super fast response times.

For those in older version looking to upgrade the dbms base but wanting to keep the application code as-is, no worries since Core will also support the InfluxDB 1.x and 2.x write APIs.

Compatibility support aside, InfluxDB 3 Core’s features include:

• Diskless architecture with object storage support (or local disk with no dependencies)
• Fast query response times (under 10ms for last-value queries, or 30ms for distinct metadata)
• Embedded Python VM for plugins and triggers
• Parquet file persistence

As far as the Enterprise version goes, it builds on the Core’s functionality and adds:

• Historical query capability and single series indexing
• High availability
• Read replicas
• Enhanced security (coming soon)
• Row-level delete support (coming soon)
• Integrated admin UI (coming soon)

InfluxDB 3 Core is right now available for testing and feedback, but it's not meant for use in production. In even more experimental status is a new plugin system that lets users define Python scripts that can collect, process, transform, and monitor data on the fly directly in the database. When it'll be ready it's going to be a boon for data scientist working on time-series streaming data.

So if you want to experience all the new features, go ahead grab and build the software from its Github repo. It's also available as a docker image for a much easier setup. But as said, since still in Alpha, proceed with caution.

More Information

InfluxDB 3 Core Github

InfluxDB 3 Core documentation

Related Articles

InfluxDB 3.0 Time-Series Database Released

Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB Handles Your Time Series Workloads

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