InfluxDB is designed to either store data for some given period of time (a retention policy) or forever, whichever you need. The ephemeral nature of time serie

InfluxDB is designed to either store data for some given period of time (a retention policy) or forever, whichever you need. The ephemeral nature of time series is more about the fact that metadata and the raw data are constantly changing. For example if you use a round robin database (like Graphite or RRD) you have to pre-allocate the file based on how much of the series data you're going to have (e.g. 10s samples for 3 months). Having series that are ephemeral and may exist for an hour or a day make this much harder to deal with. Our storage engine, the Time Structured Merge Tree, is designed with this ephemeral nature in mind. So it's able to store this data efficiently. The 0.9.6 release that came out today has that storage engine in it for testing. We'll release it for production use at the end of January after more testing.