What you are describing is exactly what Carbon does (The datastore of Graphite). It's a few hundred lines of not-exactly-production-quality python. But if you'

What you are describing is exactly what Carbon does (The datastore of Graphite). It's a few hundred lines of not-exactly-production-quality python. But if you'd actually RTFA, you'd know that Whisper is hardly the end-all of TSD, that cache to batch is not so trivial as you make it seem. I do believe there's sort of optimal solution that isn't very complex and not far away from many solutions out there. But most definitely more complex than the TSD's in existance today. You say over-engineered, but if you'd take a look at what's out there, they're all super simple. Usually being a simple layer over some pre-existing storage engine. I'd be surprised if in any of the currently popular TSD's there more than a month or two of fulltime work put in just the storage engine. Even though there are so many, no one has time to make them as optimized as say popular SQL databases are.