
Errplane (YC W13) Snags $8.1M for Open-Source InfluxDB Time Database - toddpersen
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/08/errplane-snags-8-1m-to-continue-building-open-source-influxdb-time-database/
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pauldix
One of the founders here. Thanks to the community for all the support and
encouragement. We couldn't have gotten this far without people getting excited
about our software. 2015 is going to be a great year for open source time
series databases!

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polskibus
How does your offering compare to KX ? [http://kx.com/](http://kx.com/) . Do
you see as a direct competitor or rather a completely different product? Do
you see yourself competing in the financial sector soon?

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pauldix
KX seems to be much more focused on the financial sector use case. It's also
closed source and has been around for a long time.

We're open source and want to make sure we hit use cases in DevOps, metrics,
and sensor data. The financial market data use case is a nice to have for what
we're building, but it's certainly not what we're optimizing for.

If we compete in the financial sector with them, it won't be for a while.

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stuntprogrammer
Disclaimers: I was CTO@Kx for a while, but also like InfluxDB :-)

It is definitely more finance oriented, though Kx are making moves towards
other application areas. Another difference I'd highlight is that Kx
concentrate on the core database itself, esp. performance and expressiveness
of the query language, and leave things like GUIs and admin add-on tools to
partners (like first derivatives and aquaq).

kdb does just fine with metrics and sensor data. Personally, I would argue
that it's weaker on string handling though, which can hurt in certain use
cases.

I doubt it'll go open source any time soon. However, it being around a long
time is something salescritters can spin to wonderful effect re stability,
support, etc etc. ;-)

I think there are fine application areas in finance that you should consider
-- just consider the many areas where the core problem isn't related to
juggling TB of market data ticks coming off the exchanges.

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pauldix
Thanks! That last use case you talk about is the one I'm definitely thinking
is what we won't be pursuing. Lots of money there, but hard to come after an
entrenched competitor that is heavily optimized for it ;)

If KX is making moves into sensors are they competing more with Informix? Or
maybe Vertica?

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stuntprogrammer
It's been a while since I've been an insider, and these comments are purely
from an outside perspective, interacting with such users.

Vertica is seeing use for more historical stuff, and where the time series
queries are pretty simple. Informix time series is doing ok, and has better
support for rich queries, but isn't really playing realtime. MemSQL has the
realtime perf (hi guys!) but needs to beef up on expressiveness. SAP HANA
could do it, but not seeing major uptake there.

Still seeing lots of ad hoc solutions, and the expected experimentation with
the usual hadoop menagerie (spark is helping make that practical).

The sensor stuff gets interesting at scale. Individual sources may not be
producing data that quickly, but in aggregate it can be entertaining volume.
Esp. when it comes to mobile things, and correlations become interesting to
look at.

Deep thoughts need to wait for the coffee to kick in.

I suspect we'll see a lot of reinvention of technology to cope with these
problems; perhaps even open source..

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q_no
Oh that's great news! I've been using Influx for about a year know and I'm
really happy with it already. Hopefully the upcoming version 0.9 with BoltDB
will even better than the current storage engines. I'm also contributing to
one of the drivers and most of the time it has been fun using it.

@Paul, are you still going to release a preview of 0.9 in december or is it
delayed to celebrate the news? ;)

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pauldix
We're trying to get the 0.9.0 previews out as quickly as possible. We're
trying to get something out for testing by the end of the year, but there's
still a lot to do.

In software development there are lies, damn lies, and timeline estimates ;)

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q_no
I'm glad I'm not the only one facing those challenges! Well, I'd be happy if
you guys make it in mid January.

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knodi
Been flowing InfluxDB for sometime now and used it to do some analytics work
few times. Loved it and will use again every chance i get. Also plus points
for being written in clean idiomatic Go.

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mrkurt
InfluxDB is one of our favorite database (we host and run open source DBs
...). Most people can get more from their data by recognizing time series
problems, and it's nice to have an easily accessible DB to put that sort of
information into.

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munimkazia
Great news for them. I built a dashboard a few months ago using graphs which
pull data from InfluxDB and I had a lot of fun with it. To me, it seem a whole
lot easier to use than Graphite.

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ridruejo
The underlying technology is pretty cool and the team behind it is quite
smart, glad to see they are being successful.

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kanwisher
Looks like some healthy competition to graphite

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curiousDog
I still don't completely grasp what this is. Is it actually a database
application that is specifically built to scale-out (shard) time series data?

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valarauca1
In short no. In long, there have been attempts mostly failed ones. The current
industry standard is making a big NAS and putting paths to log files in an SQL
database, and make a nice java front end to chop up logs by time stamp.

The idea is from a testing perspective (I do data acquisition and analysis for
test systems), is when a part breaks, or something critical in your test
happens.

You want to find the source of failure. Often times analyzing every single
data point is pointless, especially after a 10 hour test with 100 points per
second per channel. And you only want to see ~2 minutes of data.

How most systems work is you need to open up a measurement file, and either
use a stand alone tool to chop this (and pray it doesn't corrupt your
measurement file). Or from what I understand Influx simply lets you query time
code to time code and return channels via pattern matching within that time
span.

Very simple.

Data management is another big issue. A single day's worth of road test can be
~5-10TB per vehicle (2 months of testing + 20 vehicle fleet). Also this total
is project to like all things double every year -_-'

Also as far as I understand Influx doesn't support sound or video. Which is
really what aerospace and automotive are looking for.

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pauldix
The upcoming version will have support for raw byte values. Then you'll be
able to query those out based on tagged metadata and the time.

Custom processing against raw byte values (and other custom functions) should
come sometime next year.

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vj44
Good luck on your journey Todd & Paul!

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pauldix
thanks!

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raspasov
Congrats on the funding! What data structures do you guys use for storage and
indexing?

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nwatson
Already been done in 2001-2004: Sensage
([http://www.sensage.com/](http://www.sensage.com/),
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensage)),
followed by Vertica, etc. All the columnar-storage big-table timestamped data
collectors and data aggregators. Sensage failed at the market. Splunk
succeeded, perhaps with a different underlying data storage model, but
certainly with great marketing.

What's different about InfluxDB?

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pauldix
I'm not familiar with Sensage and I know of Vertica. Open source is a key
difference. Developers want to build their products and careers on open tools
and we want to help them do it when it comes to time series data.

There will be more as we go along. Our project is a year old and had 2-3
people working on it for most of the time.

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jdc0589
Haven't played with InfluxDB much, but it seems great. Congratulations!

Now....any chance of open sourcing the retired errplane codebase?

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blyxa
Hi, I'm on os x using macport. What are my options for installing InfluxDB?

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pauldix
Switch to Homebrew and "brew install influxdb" or build from source. It'll be
much easier to do the latter once 0.9.0 is released.

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contingencies
Difference from _rrdtool_?

