InfluxDB is a part of a longer term trend in the database world where we went from monolithic systems, very small number of very expensive ones like Oracle or DB2. Instead we’ve seen a proliferation of databases that are specialized for the particular use case you’re using them for.
The reason you end up with specialized categories is because if you focus on those particular use cases, you can end up building systems that are like 10x better than the general purpose one.
The time series database as a category is relatively new. Often deal with lots of really high volume, denormalized data. You’re basically having to read CSV files that come in and they quickly want to be able to query them within milliseconds.
There’s a huge number of examples, both open and closed source at this type of database. Influx is one, but there’s a whole bunch of ones like Graphite and Prometheus. There’s a whole bunch of closed source ones, at the big internet companies, like Guerrilla from Facebook or Monarch from Google, and internally developed, proprietary databases like at Datadog.
Influx is the biggest open source one.
As we had more and more systems that operated, you need to actually be able to observe them and figure out what they were doing, which actually turned out to be a major data challenge themselves. But it’s a very different data set than like your bank account records, which is what the traditional transaction system databases were designed for. The workload characteristics are quite different.