An Introduction to InfluxDB, a Time Series Database

This article introduces the time series database, InfluxDB, which is an open source application written in the Go programming language. InfluxDB is easy to use, scalable and highly available.

Atime series database is used to store log, sensor and other data, over a period of time. With the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), one needs to log events across multiple applications. A time series database is uniquely positioned to solve the challenges of millions of events coming in, which you need to filter and analyse.

This article shows readers how to set up InfluxDB on Windows. It will also demonstrate how data can be inserted into InfluxDB, how to perform basic queries and look at the REST API that it exposes.

The TICK stack

InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB, provides a platform known as the TICK stack. This is a comprehensive platform to collect, store, analyse and visualise time series data. The TICK stack comprises Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograph and Kapacitor. In this article, we are going to concentrate on the core product, InfluxDB, which is used to store and query the time series database.

The above products are all free to download and use. They are open source projects (MIT Licence) but, at the same time, InfluxData provides commercial versions of the products, which come with full support and additional enterprise features that are chargeable.

Installation

InfluxDB is available on all major platforms including Windows. The product is packaged as a set of binaries that you can run on Windows. The best part of this is that the binaries have all the required dependencies built-in. So you do not need any other dependencies to be installed on Windows to run the InfluxDB software.

To install the product, currently at 1.0.0, visit the following URL in the browser, or you could do a wget in Powershell for the URL below to download the Zip file.

The next step is to simply unzip the file in a folder of your choice. For example, when we unzip the above folder in the root drive (say C:\), we get the following folder and executables: