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The Influx team is doing great things - however from the perspective of someone who's tried using InfluxDB in the last few months for a production app: I reall

by lfittl 11y ago

The Influx team is doing great things - however from the perspective of someone who's tried using InfluxDB in the last few months for a production app: I really, really wish they'd hire 2-3 more database engineers to focus on the actual timeseries database, not nice looking tooling around it. Simple things like incremental backups are still not working as expected in recent releases. Useful features from the 0.8 series still haven't been ported. And tsm1 is a neverending effort it seems. We've went back to Postgres for storing timeseries data since we didn't feel confident to use InfluxDB in production.

officialchicken 11y ago
I haven't given up on Influx, yet, but I'm close. A simple "DELETE * FROM series" without a where clause the system to freeze up while the CPU spins out of control, usually requiring a reboot to clear up after the KILL'd proc.(0.9.4 + Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and Go 1.4/1.5 combos all exhibit the behavior for me). I have also not been able to get incremental backups working, have not been able to restore any snapshots, but I have had data survive reboots. Unless I can get fairly predictable behavior out of Influx the proceess on my systems, it's going to remain in the "unpredictable-so-undependable" category, and far away from "I should pay monthly for this service".
- pauldix 11y ago
  DELTE FROM hasn't been wired up yet: https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1647 https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1647 Unfortunately, we were passing that through to the DB which was causing problems. The current release 0.9.6 will return an error. You can drop an entire series, but you can't yet drop a specific time range. We'll hopefully get that in soon, but we need to get TSM out in production before we start looking at those additional features.
pauldix 11y ago
We're actively hiring for database engineers right now. Backups are coming in the next release. Which features from 0.8 aren't there? TSM is an effort, but not never ending. We just refuse to put it out there until we've done enough testing on it to be certain about its robustness. We think the community will be happier if we wait to release it rather than rushing something out that may or may not be ready. That being said, please test out TSM on the 0.9.6 release. I think you'll find that its performance is better than anything we've released previously (including 0.8) and so far we've been able to write far more data into it than in previous 0.9 storage engines. I'm sorry to hear that you had to go back to Postgres for your time series storage. Hopefully our upcoming releases will give you a reason to take another look.
- parenthephobia 11y ago
  > Which features from 0.8 aren't there? For me, the lack of HISTOGRAM and DIFFERENCE have actually stopped me doing things I wanted to do. Obviously, JOIN isn't there either, although that hasn't been an issue for me. :)
  - pauldix 11y ago
    Ok thanks. Hopefully we'll be able to get to those soon. We have some significant work happening in the query engine that should make it easier to add in new functions (join included). We'll also be writing up instructions for how to contribute new functions. We're trying to make the system simple enough for anyone to come in and add them in without having to know all the database internals.
- lfittl 11y ago
  Thanks for the thoughtful reply! Appreciate the work on performance, its essential and the main motivator to use Influx instead of Postgres. I'll certainly revisit Influx once tsm1 is the default and backups are in :) Re 0.8: As the other poster noted, I think it was related to histograms and/or derivatives - would have to go back to look.
  - pauldix 11y ago
    Yeah, histograms need to be added back in. I just replied to the other poster with a bit more info too. derivative and non_negative_derivative are in the current release. Hopefully 0.10.0 will convince you to come back over :)

by lfittl 11y ago

officialchicken 11y ago

I haven't given up on Influx, yet, but I'm close. A simple "DELETE * FROM series" without a where clause the system to freeze up while the CPU spins out of control, usually requiring a reboot to clear up after the KILL'd proc.(0.9.4 + Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and Go 1.4/1.5 combos all exhibit the behavior for me). I have also not been able to get incremental backups working, have not been able to restore any snapshots, but I have had data survive reboots. Unless I can get fairly predictable behavior out of Influx the proceess on my systems, it's going to remain in the "unpredictable-so-undependable" category, and far away from "I should pay monthly for this service".

pauldix 11y ago
DELTE FROM hasn't been wired up yet: https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1647 https://github.com/influxdb/influxdb/issues/1647 Unfortunately, we were passing that through to the DB which was causing problems. The current release 0.9.6 will return an error. You can drop an entire series, but you can't yet drop a specific time range. We'll hopefully get that in soon, but we need to get TSM out in production before we start looking at those additional features.

pauldix 11y ago

We're actively hiring for database engineers right now. Backups are coming in the next release. Which features from 0.8 aren't there? TSM is an effort, but not never ending. We just refuse to put it out there until we've done enough testing on it to be certain about its robustness. We think the community will be happier if we wait to release it rather than rushing something out that may or may not be ready. That being said, please test out TSM on the 0.9.6 release. I think you'll find that its performance is better than anything we've released previously (including 0.8) and so far we've been able to write far more data into it than in previous 0.9 storage engines. I'm sorry to hear that you had to go back to Postgres for your time series storage. Hopefully our upcoming releases will give you a reason to take another look.

parenthephobia 11y ago
> Which features from 0.8 aren't there? For me, the lack of HISTOGRAM and DIFFERENCE have actually stopped me doing things I wanted to do. Obviously, JOIN isn't there either, although that hasn't been an issue for me. :)
- pauldix 11y ago
  Ok thanks. Hopefully we'll be able to get to those soon. We have some significant work happening in the query engine that should make it easier to add in new functions (join included). We'll also be writing up instructions for how to contribute new functions. We're trying to make the system simple enough for anyone to come in and add them in without having to know all the database internals.
lfittl 11y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! Appreciate the work on performance, its essential and the main motivator to use Influx instead of Postgres. I'll certainly revisit Influx once tsm1 is the default and backups are in :) Re 0.8: As the other poster noted, I think it was related to histograms and/or derivatives - would have to go back to look.
- pauldix 11y ago
  Yeah, histograms need to be added back in. I just replied to the other poster with a bit more info too. derivative and non_negative_derivative are in the current release. Hopefully 0.10.0 will convince you to come back over :)