July 2021 Summaries

The latest QuestDB release, version 6.0.4, introduces enhancements driven by community feedback, including performance improvements, increased parallelization, and the introduction of a framework for Prometheus metrics, developed by community member Piotr Rżysko. This update addresses stability issues and provides new capabilities such as calendar alignment for SAMPLE BY queries, allowing sampled groups to align with calendar dates using optional time zones and offsets. The release also optimizes SQL query performance, particularly for LATEST BY queries, by parallelizing operations and refining aggregate calculations. Prometheus metrics have been integrated, enabling users to monitor QuestDB instances by setting basic counters for SQL queries. A notable change is the enforcement of timestamps having only positive values, disallowing pre-1970 dates. The release is available on Docker Hub, and QuestDB is encouraging community engagement through GitHub discussions to gather feedback and foster open-ended conversations.

Gábor Boros provides a detailed tutorial on using Telegraf to collect system metrics and send them as time series data to QuestDB for analysis and visualization. The guide outlines the process of setting up a data collection system using DigitalOcean droplets, where Telegraf agents gather metrics like CPU and memory usage, sending this data to a QuestDB instance for storage and visualization. The tutorial addresses the issue of out-of-order data arrival, which QuestDB now handles smoothly since its 6.0 release. Readers are guided through creating droplets on DigitalOcean, installing Telegraf, and configuring it to send data to QuestDB, utilizing InfluxDB line protocol. It also shows how to run SQL queries on the collected data and perform visualizations using QuestDB's interface. The tutorial concludes by suggesting further exploration of Telegraf's integrations and using Grafana for more advanced dashboard setups.