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What's a "time series storage"?

• tnecniv 10y ago
  A store for time series data. That is, data collected over a continuous (normally time) interval.
• dingaling 10y ago
  Time-series data is chronological and immutable and which has time as a primary dimension; think about the outputs of a weather-monitoring station for example which streams air pressure, wind speed and direction and temperature at ( say ) one-second intervals. You can stuff all that into a standard RDBMS with appropriate schema design but there's a lot of wasted overhead; you're not going to execute updates, for example, and there can probably be a lot of smart compression achievable for long series of unchanging data, such as air pressure which might remain constant for hours and then change gradually. ~~ A slightly more obscure example is ADS-B data streamed from aircraft. I did a logging system and schema a few years back and in order to handle the input volume it held the raw data on ramdisk and ran summarisation logic before inserting into an RDBMS. So it persisted the minimum and maximum altitudes of a particular aircraft in a particular period, for example, but in doing so we lost data on the intermediate vertical flightpath and rates of change. And each aircraft had multiple time periods for each encounter. It rapidly became quite complicated compared to the use a time-series store where the data would be stored in sequence and the complicated logic is moved to the offline query stage rather than the up-front storage pre-processing stage.