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 would like contact the InfluxDB IOx developers, join the InfluxData Community Slack and look for the #influxdb_iox channel.

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. Compiling and Running (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)
• Postgres

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.

C/C++ Compiler

You need some C/C++ compiler for some non-Rust dependencies like zstd.

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

Prost no longer bundles a protoc binary. For instructions on how to install protoc, refer to the official gRPC documentation.

IOx should then build correctly.

Postgres

The catalog is stored in Postgres (unless you're running in ephemeral mode). Postgres can be installed via Homebrew:

brew install postgres

then follow the instructions for starting Postgres either at system startup or on-demand.

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 configuration file, making it suitable for deployment in containerized environments.

For a list of 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

Compiling and Running

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

To compile for development, run:

cargo build

To compile for release and install the influxdb_iox binary in your path (so you can run influxdb_iox directly) do:

# from within the main `influxdb_iox` checkout
cargo install --path influxdb_iox

This creates a binary at target/debug/influxdb_iox.

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 .

Local filesystem testing mode

InfluxDB IOx supports testing entirely backed by the local filesystem.

Note

This mode should NOT be used for production systems: it will have poor performance and limited tuning knobs are available.

To run IOx in local testing mode, use:

./target/debug/influxdb_iox
# shorthand for
./target/debug/influxdb_iox run all-in-one

This will start an "all-in-one" IOx server with the following configuration:

1. File backed catalog (sqlite), object store, and write ahead log (wal) stored under <HOMEDIR>/.influxdb_iox
2. HTTP v2 api server on port 8080, querier gRPC server on port 8082 and several ports for other internal services.

You can also change the configuration in limited ways, such as choosing a different data directory:

./target/debug/influxdb_iox run all-in-one --data-dir=/tmp/iox_data

Compile and run

Rather than building and running the binary in target, you can also compile and run with one command:

cargo run -- run all-in-one

Release mode for performance testing

To compile for performance testing, build in release mode then use the binary in target/release:

cargo build --release
./target/release/influxdb_iox run all-in-one

You can also compile and run in release mode with one step:

cargo run --release -- run all-in-one

Running tests

You can run tests using:

cargo test --all

See [docs/testing.md] for more information

Write and read data

Data can be written to InfluxDB IOx by sending line protocol format to the /api/v2/write endpoint or using the CLI.

For example, assuming you are running in local mode, this command will send data in the test_fixtures/lineproto/metrics.lp file to the company_sensors namespace.

./target/debug/influxdb_iox -vv write company_sensors test_fixtures/lineproto/metrics.lp --host http://localhost:8080

Note that --host http://localhost:8080 is required as the /v2/api endpoint is hosted on port 8080 while the default is the querier gRPC port 8082.

To query the data stored in the company_sensors namespace:

./target/debug/influxdb_iox 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 namespaces. IOx maps organization and bucket pairs to namespaces with the two parts separated by an underscore (_): organization_bucket.

Here's an example using curl to send data into the company_sensors namespace 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 @test_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 convenient 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 Documentation

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