January 2017 Summaries

InfluxDB 1.2 was released, offering subqueries and improved write throughput on larger hardware configurations.` `UltraLinq is utilizing InfluxDB to track and report data from medical imaging exams, leveraging its ability to handle large amounts of data points efficiently while being relatively inexpensive.` `InfluxData is hiring and is hosting upcoming live webinars and virtual training sessions for developers and users.

InfluxDB has introduced subqueries in version 1.2, a new feature that increases the functionality of InfluxQL queries, allowing for more granular insights into data. Subqueries are used to perform functions on functions or execute mathematical operations on query results, and can also be used to place specific conditions on the results of another query. The new feature is available in version 1.2 of InfluxDB and can be found in the documentation on the Data Exploration page.

The InfluxData company has released the 1.2 version of its TICK stack with improved performance, usability, and reliability, as well as an updated Enterprise edition with enhanced backup and restore capabilities. This marks a significant milestone in the company's goal to become the platform of record for developers and architects building real-time IoT, analytics, and monitoring applications. To support this ambitious objective, InfluxData has added two new executives, Tim Hall and Mark Herring, who bring extensive experience from leading Open Source Enterprise Apache Hadoop implementations. With their help, the company aims to improve its products, processes, and community engagement, ultimately reducing time to value for developers and increasing awareness of the use of time-series data platforms.

The release of InfluxDB 1.2 brings significant improvements in reducing lock contention in the write path, resulting in a 50% gain on total write throughput on larger hardware. This release also introduces support for subqueries, allowing users to execute queries like the sum of derivatives, which is useful for analyzing network bandwidth across machines. Additionally, InfluxDB Enterprise now provides built-in incremental backup, while Kapacitor 1.2 adds new features such as improved windowing and alert handling capabilities, including enhanced alert condition handling and decoupling of alert handlers from alert conditions. The TICK stack has made significant progress in reducing lock contention and improving the overall performance of its components.

InfluxData has expanded its executive team with the addition of Tim Hall as Vice President of Products and Mark Herring as Chief Marketing Officer, both seasoned professionals with extensive experience in product management and marketing, respectively. The company's CEO Evan Kaplan welcomed Hall and Herring, citing their expertise and energy to propel InfluxData to a leadership role in real-time monitoring and analytics applications. With over 25 years of combined experience, Hall and Herring bring their knowledge of open source platforms and developer-centric strategies to the table, aiming to optimize for developer happiness and deliver tools that are a joy to use. As part of its growing presence, InfluxData continues to serve over 200 customers, including prominent organizations such as eBay, Mozilla, and Barclay's, with its comprehensive platform supporting log, metric, IoT, and sensor data collection, storage, visualization, and alerting.

InfluxDB Enterprise 1.2 delivers significant improvements in write performance, with a 50% increase, and introduces advanced backup and restore capabilities, including incremental backups to reduce storage costs. The new version is built on the open source TICK stack, which has been enhanced with features such as sub-queries in the query language, a significantly improved data cache, and more flexible alert condition handling for Kapacitor. This update enables customers to expand their real-time IoT and monitoring solutions to even more demanding problems, while providing greater flexibility and simplicity in managing their InfluxDB Enterprise instances.

As a seasoned product manager, Tim Hall joined InfluxData in 2017 to lead the products organization, citing the need for time-based data management as a key driver of his career change. With over 16 years of experience in enterprise software products, he brings expertise in big data technologies like Hadoop and Apache Spark. Hall emphasizes the importance of simplicity, extensibility, and user-centric design in product development, particularly for infrastructure platforms. He looks forward to advocating for customer and community engagement at InfluxData, building on the TICK stack's success, and exploring new opportunities with Go. With a focus on delivering value faster and reducing complexity, Hall is excited to bring his experience to InfluxData and contribute to the growth of the company.

InfluxDB Week in Review Jan 23, 2017` Mika Meyer's post recaps the most interesting InfluxDB related content from the past week or so. The company had a whirlwind year in 2016 and has recently announced new hires and upcoming live webinars and virtual training sessions. Nebbiolo Technologies, an IoT startup using InfluxDB for industrial automation, is featured as a testimonial, showcasing how they use InfluxDB to analyze sensor data and improve manufacturing insights. The company is now offering a chance for other businesses to be featured on the InfluxData website in exchange for promoting the platform, with a "thank you" gift of an InfluxDB hoodie and stickers for those who participate.

The new version of InfluxDB (1.2) introduces several exciting features, including support for subqueries in InfluxQL's SELECT statements, allowing users to apply a query as a condition in the enclosing query. Additionally, the Command Line Interface (CLI) now supports using alternative retention policies with the `USE` command, eliminating the need to fully qualify measurement names every time. Furthermore, a fix has been made for the `SAMPLE(*)` function, which now returns a random sample of points for every field in the measurement, regardless of its data type.

InfluxDB Week in Review Jan 17, 2017` Mika Meyer of InfluxData is recapping the most interesting InfluxDB related content from the last week or so. This includes announcements, blogs, videos and how-to guides, as well as updates on hiring, upcoming live webinars, and virtual training. Unix Edge has shared a success story about using InfluxDB for their industrial machine data collection project, praising its performance, reliability, and support. The company also shares that migrating from other time-series databases was easy and thanks the excellent training provided by Michael DeSa. Additionally, InfluxData is offering a "thank you" gift to companies featuring on influxdata.com, including an InfluxDB hoodie and stickers.

In this weekly post from InfluxDB, the team shares interesting issues, workarounds, and Q&A related to InfluxDB and its TICK-stack components. The query on continuous queries (CQs) explains that CQs generate time ranges that might not be expected by users, and provides a workaround using `time(1w,1d)` instead of just `time(1w)`. Additionally, the post addresses SHOW FIELD KEYS query discrepancies, explaining that this query automatically returns every data type in a field, and notes that data types can only differ across shards. The post also discusses local configuration settings for InfluxDB v1.1, highlighting that section headers are commented out by default and must be uncommented and restarted to enable the web admin interface.

InfluxDB Week in Review Jan 9, 2017``` In this week's review, InfluxData shares updates on company growth and recent events, including a keynote speaker at Data Day Texas. The company also announces its use by AXA, a multinational investment firm, to store user metrics and trigger alerts using InfluxDB. Additionally, InfluxData is hiring and offers upcoming live webinars and virtual training. The company invites companies with production use of InfluxDB to be featured on their website and receive a "thank you" gift, including an InfluxDB hoodie and stickers.

InfluxDB's INTO query can turn tags into fields by default, which may lead to unexpected behavior if not handled properly, such as losing the ability to group by those tags in the new retention policy. To avoid this, it's recommended to include GROUP BY * in INTO queries to preserve all original tags as tags in the destination data. Additionally, InfluxDB's ELAPSED() function can be used to query data based on time intervals, but specifying a unit greater than the difference between timestamps returns 0, which may not produce the desired results if not handled correctly.

InfluxDB has been featured in various announcements, blogs, videos, and how-to guides, including new features such as log states and TICK Tock, as well as beta releases like Chronograf Beta3. The company also released a benchmark showing that InfluxDB outperforms OpenTSDB in time-series data and metrics. Additionally, InfluxDB Cloud now offers multi-tenant support for Grafana, allowing configurable access to different groups of users. A notable customer testimonial comes from eBay, which uses InfluxDB with Grafana to store around 2K new cluster health metrics per minute. The company is also seeking out user success stories and offering a "thank you" gift, including an InfluxDB hoodie, to those featured on their website or social media channels.