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I was just evaluating InfluxDB yesterday for a commercial data streaming pipeline, but there are too many different names and versions that it is VERY unclear w

I was just evaluating InfluxDB yesterday for a commercial data streaming pipeline, but there are too many different names and versions that it is VERY unclear what's what, and what is actually available.

jovezhong 3y ago
"Turns out, stream processing was only really just getting started. In the last 12-18 months a veritable plethora of stream processing projects and companies have shown up, demonstrating that there is not only demand for it but also different approaches to take too." https://rmoff.net/2023/09/21/an-itch-that-just-has-to-be-scratched-or-why-am-i-joining-decodable/ https://rmoff.net/2023/09/21/an-itch-that-just-has-to-be-scr... Feel free to check out OSS Proton: github.com/timeplus-io/proton, and let me know any documentation/design need to be updated to make it a bit clearer
srhtftw 3y ago
Anyone evaluating them should be very cautious given their history. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657829. I'm sorry to say I don't have much good to say about InfluxDB. I first considered them around 2015. I loaded about a week of logs from our OpenStack systems into it. It seemed to work so I included it in our set of internally supported systems and started going about the task of adding it to our backup schedule. Well, perhaps things are different now but at the time the only way to do a full backup was to save the output from a command like "select * from *". Before adding that to a cron task I tried it from the admin console and quickly caused the server to OOM and die. It was immediately clear to me that this wasn't a company that cared much about reliability since I was able to trivially crash it doing the only thing I could do at the time to backup my system. Obviously nobody at Influx cared about pesky things like backups or workload management, so I quietly decommissioned the system without incident and moved on to other things. Some years later I watched Andy Pavlo interview their founder on one of the regular CMU database sessions. Andy was very critical at many points, effectively telling him "we told you this wouldn't work". I felt much the same way. Influx looks very much like a company that may eventually build right thing after building everything else first.

jovezhong 3y ago

"Turns out, stream processing was only really just getting started. In the last 12-18 months a veritable plethora of stream processing projects and companies have shown up, demonstrating that there is not only demand for it but also different approaches to take too." https://rmoff.net/2023/09/21/an-itch-that-just-has-to-be-scratched-or-why-am-i-joining-decodable/ https://rmoff.net/2023/09/21/an-itch-that-just-has-to-be-scr... Feel free to check out OSS Proton: github.com/timeplus-io/proton, and let me know any documentation/design need to be updated to make it a bit clearer

srhtftw 3y ago

Anyone evaluating them should be very cautious given their history. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657829. I'm sorry to say I don't have much good to say about InfluxDB. I first considered them around 2015. I loaded about a week of logs from our OpenStack systems into it. It seemed to work so I included it in our set of internally supported systems and started going about the task of adding it to our backup schedule. Well, perhaps things are different now but at the time the only way to do a full backup was to save the output from a command like "select * from *". Before adding that to a cron task I tried it from the admin console and quickly caused the server to OOM and die. It was immediately clear to me that this wasn't a company that cared much about reliability since I was able to trivially crash it doing the only thing I could do at the time to backup my system. Obviously nobody at Influx cared about pesky things like backups or workload management, so I quietly decommissioned the system without incident and moved on to other things. Some years later I watched Andy Pavlo interview their founder on one of the regular CMU database sessions. Andy was very critical at many points, effectively telling him "we told you this wouldn't work". I felt much the same way. Influx looks very much like a company that may eventually build right thing after building everything else first.