InfluxDB IOx

InfluxDB IOx (short for Iron Oxide, pronounced InfluxDB "eye-ox") is the future core of InfluxDB, an open source time series database. The name is in homage to Rust, the language this project is written in. It is built using Apache Arrow and DataFusion among other things. InfluxDB IOx aims to be:

• The future core of InfluxDB; supporting industry standard SQL, InfluxQL, and Flux
• An in-memory columnar store using object storage for persistence
• A fast analytic database for structured and semi-structured events (like logs and tracing data)
• A system for defining replication (synchronous, asynchronous, push and pull) and partitioning rules for InfluxDB time series data and tabular analytics data
• A system supporting real-time subscriptions
• A processor that can transform and do arbitrary computation on time series and event data as it arrives
• An analytic database built for data science, supporting Apache Arrow Flight for fast data transfer

Persistence is through Parquet files in object storage. It is a design goal to support integration with other big data systems through object storage and Parquet specifically.

For more details on the motivation behind the project and some of our goals, read through the InfluxDB IOx announcement blog post. If you prefer a video that covers a little bit of InfluxDB history and high level goals for InfluxDB IOx you can watch Paul Dix's announcement talk from InfluxDays NA 2020. For more details on the motivation behind the selection of Apache Arrow, Flight and Parquet, read this.

Supported Platforms

As we commit to support platforms they will be added here. Our current goal is that the following platforms will be able to run InfluxDB IOx.

• Linux x86 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
• Darwin x86 (x86_64-apple-darwin)
• Darwin arm (aarch64-apple-darwin)

This list is very unlikely to be complete; we will add more platforms based on our ability to support them effectively.

Project Status

This project is very early and in active development. It isn't yet ready for testing, which is why we're not producing builds or documentation yet. If you're interested in following along with the project, drop into our community Slack channel #influxdb_iox. You can find links to join here.

We're also hosting monthly tech talks and community office hours on the project on the 2nd Wednesday of the month at 8:30 AM Pacific Time.

• Signup for upcoming IOx tech talks
• Watch past IOx tech talks

Get started

1. Install dependencies
2. Clone the repository
3. Configure the server
4. Compile and start the server (You can also build a Docker image to run InfluxDB IOx.)
5. Write and read data
6. Use the CLI
7. Use InfluxDB 2.0 API compatibility
8. Run health checks
9. Manually call the gRPC API

Install dependencies

To compile and run InfluxDB IOx from source, you'll need the following:

• Rust
• Clang
• lld (on Linux)
• protoc (on Apple Silicon)

Rust

The easiest way to install Rust is to use rustup, a Rust version manager. Follow the instructions for your operating system on the rustup site.

rustup will check the rust-toolchain file and automatically install and use the correct Rust version for you.

Clang

Building InfluxDB IOx requires clang (for the croaring dependency). Check for clang by running clang --version.

clang --version
Apple clang version 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.27)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin20.1.0
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin

If clang is not already present, it can typically be installed with the system package manager.

lld

If you are building InfluxDB IOx on Linux then you will need to ensure you have installed the lld LLVM linker. Check if you have already installed it by running lld -version.

lld -version
lld is a generic driver.
Invoke ld.lld (Unix), ld64.lld (macOS), lld-link (Windows), wasm-ld (WebAssembly) instead

If lld is not already present, it can typically be installed with the system package manager.

protoc

If you are building InfluxDB IOx on Apple Silicon you may find that the build fails with an error containing:

failed to invoke protoc (hint: https://docs.rs/prost-build/#sourcing-protoc): Bad CPU type in executable (os error 86)

Prost bundles a protoc binary, which it uses if it cannot find a system alternative. Prior to version 0.9, the binary it chooses with the above error is an x86 one, which won't work if you do not have Rosetta installed on your system.

You can install Rosetta by running:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

An alternative to installing Rosetta is to point Prost at an arm build of protoc. First, install protoc, e.g., via Homebrew:

brew update && brew install protobuf

Then set the following environment variables to point Prost at your system install:

PROTOC=/opt/homebrew/bin/protoc 
PROTOC_INCLUDE=/opt/homebrew/include

IOx should then build correctly.

Clone the repository

Clone this repository using git. If you use the git command line, this looks like:

git clone git@github.com:influxdata/influxdb_iox.git

Then change into the directory containing the code:

cd influxdb_iox

The rest of these instructions assume you are in this directory.

Configure the server

InfluxDB IOx can be configured using either environment variables or a configutation file, making it suitable for deployment in containerized environments.

For a list configuration options, run influxdb_iox --help. For configuration options for specific subcommands, run influxdb_iox <subcommand> --help.

To use a configuration file, use a .env file in the working directory. See the provided example configuration file. To use the example configuration file, run:

cp docs/env.example .env

Compile and start the server

InfluxDB IOx is built using Cargo, Rust's package manager and build tool.

To compile for development, run:

cargo build

This which will create a binary at target/debug/influxdb_iox.

To start the InfluxDB IOx server, run:

./target/debug/influxdb_iox run database

By default the server will start an HTTP server on port 8080 and a gRPC server on port 8082.

You can also compile and run with one command:

cargo run -- run database

To compile for performance testing, build in release mode:

cargo build --release
./target/release/influxdb_iox run database

You can also run in release mode with one step:

cargo run --release -- run database

To run all available tests in debug mode, you may want to set min stack size to avoid the current known stack overflow issue:

RUST_MIN_STACK=10485760 cargo test --all

Build a Docker image (optional)

Building the Docker image requires:

• Docker 18.09+
• BuildKit

To enable BuildKit by default, set { "features": { "buildkit": true } } in the Docker engine configuration, or run docker build withDOCKER_BUILDKIT=1

To build the Docker image:

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build .

Write and read data

Each IOx instance requires a writer ID. This can be set one of 4 ways:

• set an environment variable INFLUXDB_IOX_ID=42

• set a flag --writer-id 42

• use the API (not convered here)

• use the CLI

  influxdb_iox writer set 42
  

To write data, you need to create a database. You can do so via the API or using the CLI. For example, to create a database called company_sensors, use this command:

influxdb_iox database create company_sensors

Data can be stored in InfluxDB IOx by sending it in line protocol format to the /api/v2/write endpoint or using the CLI. For example, here is a command that will send the data in the tests/fixtures/lineproto/metrics.lp file in this repository, assuming that you're running the server on the default port into the company_sensors database, you can use:

influxdb_iox database write company_sensors tests/fixtures/lineproto/metrics.lp

To query data stored in the company_sensors database:

influxdb_iox database query company_sensors "SELECT * FROM cpu LIMIT 10"

Use the CLI

InfluxDB IOx is packaged as a binary with commands to start the IOx server, as well as a CLI interface for interacting with and configuring such servers.

The CLI itself is documented via built-in help which you can access by running influxdb_iox --help

Use InfluxDB 2.0 API compatibility

InfluxDB IOx allows seamless interoperability with InfluxDB 2.0.

Where InfluxDB 2.0 stores data in organizations and buckets, InfluxDB IOx stores data in named databases. IOx maps organization and bucket pairs to databases named with the two parts separated by an underscore (_): organization_bucket.

Here's an example using curl to send data into the company_sensors database using the InfluxDB 2.0 /api/v2/write API:

curl -v "http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v2/write?org=company&bucket=sensors" --data-binary @tests/fixtures/lineproto/metrics.lp

Run health checks

The HTTP API exposes a healthcheck endpoint at /health

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/health
OK

The gRPC API implements the gRPC Health Checking Protocol. This can be tested with grpc-health-probe:

$ grpc_health_probe -addr 127.0.0.1:8082 -service influxdata.platform.storage.Storage
status: SERVING

Manually call the gRPC API

To manually invoke one of the gRPC APIs, use a gRPC CLI client such as grpcurl.

Tonic (the gRPC server library we're using) currently doesn't have support for gRPC reflection, hence you must pass all .proto files to your client. You can find a conventient grpcurl wrapper that does that in the scripts directory:

$ ./scripts/grpcurl -plaintext 127.0.0.1:8082 list
grpc.health.v1.Health
influxdata.iox.management.v1.ManagementService
influxdata.platform.storage.IOxTesting
influxdata.platform.storage.Storage
$ ./scripts/grpcurl -plaintext 127.0.0.1:8082 influxdata.iox.management.v1.ManagementService.ListDatabases
{
  "names": [
    "foobar_weather"
  ]
}

Contributing

We welcome community contributions from anyone!

Read our Contributing Guide for instructions on how to run tests and how to make your first contribution.

Architecture and Technical Documenation

There are a variety of technical documents describing various parts of IOx in the docs directory.