Company
Date Published
Author
Julie Dam
Word count
1020
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

At GrafanaCon EU, a panel discussion featuring representatives from prominent Time Series Database (TSDB) projects, including Timescale, Graphite, InfluxDB, and Prometheus, explored the state of TSDBs and the evolution of their query languages. The panelists, moderated by Grafana Labs co-founder Raj Dutt, debated the merits of SQL versus functional query languages, with InfluxDB's Paul Dix highlighting the elegance of functional approaches for advanced use cases, while recognizing SQL's accessibility for beginners. The discussion also covered the widespread adoption of PromQL due to its balance of conciseness and expressiveness, despite Prometheus lacking commercial backing, which Tom Wilkie from Prometheus argued fosters ecosystem development. The panelists acknowledged that different query languages have unique strengths, making it essential to select the right tool for each task, and emphasized the importance of interoperability and collaboration among different TSDB projects, with ongoing efforts to enhance features like continuous update queries.