InfluxDB Clustered targets on-premises time-series database deployments

InfluxDB Clustered, the self-managed, open source distributed time-series database for on-premises and private cloud deployments from InfluxData, is now generally available.

InfluxDB Clustered is expected to replace the company’s older InfluxDB Enterprise offering and is built on its next-generation time-series engine that supports SQL queries. Other versions of the database with the same engine, including InfluxDB Cloud Serverless and InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated, were released earlier.

Another version of the database, dubbed InfluxDB 3.0 Edge and aimed at delivering a time-series database for local or edge deployment, is expected to be released this year, the company said.

Compared to InfluxDB Enterprise, InfluxDB Clustered can process queries at least 100 times faster on high-cardinality data, the company said, adding that the Clustered version can also ingest data 45 times faster than the Enterprise edition.

Cardinality in a database management system can be defined as the number of unique sets of data stored in a database. The more cardinality is allowed, the more a database can scale.

The new version also offers a 90% reduction in storage costs, enabled by a low-cost object store, separation of compute and storage, and data compression, the company said.

In addition, InfluxDB Clustered offers enterprise-grade security and compliance features, including encryption of data in transit and at rest, along with other features such as single sign-on, private networking options, and attributed-based access control.

The new database version is also expected to support compliance with SOC 2 and ISO standards soon.

InfluxDB Clustered may boost InfluxData’s customer base

The release of the new database version will help InfluxData appeal to enterprise users who expect cluster support for expandability as well as high availability, as they are becoming critical requirements for any enterprise, according to IDC research vice president Carl Olofson.

In particular, databases that handle workloads with time series data have been in demand with the rise in IoT applications involving operations within oil and gas, logistics, supply chain, transportation, and healthcare, according to IDC.

InfluxDB competes with companies including Graphite, Prometheous, TimeScaleDB, QuestDB, Apache Druid and DolphinDB among others, according to database recommendation website dbengines.com  

IDC’s Olofson, however, said that InfluxDB, being a native time-series database, has advantages over other databases that are adding support for time-series data.

“Its simplicity and lack of overhead make it ideal for capturing streaming data such as sensor data, which is the most common form of data requiring time series analysis, and which more complex database management systems products tend not to be able to keep up with,” Olofson said.

InfluxDB Clustered, though, could be a tough offering for InfluxData to maintain as building proper cluster support for a database system is a complicated undertaking, he said.

“InfluxDB is open source, so the company does not have complete control over its evolution, and even if the cluster support code is not open source, it must still fit into the framework of InfluxDB and Apache Arrow, which are always in state of flux,” Olofson said.