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.

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. The first InfluxDB IOx Tech Talk is on December 9th and you can find details here.

Quick Start

To compile and run InfluxDB IOx from source, you'll need a Rust compiler and a flatc FlatBuffers compiler.

Build a Docker Image

BuildKit is required. Enable BuildKit:

• Use Docker version 18.09 or later
• Enable BuildKit by default by setting { "features": { "buildkit": true } } in the Docker engine config
  • ...or run docker build . with env var DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1

To build the Docker image:

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build .

Cloning the Repository

Using git, check out the code by cloning this repository. 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 the instructions assume you are in this directory.

Installing Rust

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

By default, rustup will install the latest stable verison of Rust. InfluxDB IOx is currently using a nightly version of Rust to get performance benefits from the unstable simd feature. The exact nightly version is specified in the rust-toolchain file. When you're in the directory containing this repository's code, rustup will look in the rust-toolchain file and automatically install and use the correct Rust version for you. Test this out with:

rustc --version

and you should see a nightly version of Rust!

Installing flatc

InfluxDB IOx uses the FlatBuffer serialization format for its write-ahead log. The flatc compiler reads the schema in generated_types/wal.fbs and generates the corresponding Rust code.

Install flatc >= 1.12.0 with one of these methods as appropriate to your operating system:

• Using a Windows binary release
• Using the flatbuffers package for conda
• Using the flatbuffers package for Arch Linux
• Using the flatbuffers package for Homebrew

Once you have installed the packages, you should be able to run:

flatc --version

and see the version displayed.

You won't have to run flatc directly; once it's available, Rust's Cargo build tool manages the compilation process by calling flatc for you.

Installing clang

An installation of clang is required to build the croaring dependency - if it is not already present, it can typically be installed with the system package manager.

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

Specifying Configuration

IOx is designed for running in modern containerized environments. As such, it takes its configuration as environment variables.

You can see a list of the current configuration values by running influxdb_iox --help, as well as the specific subcommand config options such as influxdb_iox server --help.

Should you desire specifying config via a file, you can do so using a .env formatted file in the working directory. You can use the provided example as a template if you want:

cp docs/env.example .env

Compiling and Starting the Server

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

To compile for development, run:

cargo build

which will create a binary in target/debug that you can run with:

./target/debug/influxdb_iox

You can compile and run with one command by using:

cargo run -- server

When compiling for performance testing, build in release mode by using:

cargo build --release

which will create the corresponding binary in target/release:

./target/release/influxdb_iox server

Similarly, you can do this in one step with:

cargo run --release -- server

The server will, by default, start an HTTP API server on port 8080 and a gRPC server on port 8082.

Writing and Reading 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 with a 100MB mutable buffer, use this command:

influxdb_iox database create company_sensors -m 100

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"

InfluxDB 2.0 compatibility

InfluxDB IOx allows seamless interoperability with InfluxDB 2.0.

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

Here's an example using curl command to send the same 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

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 calling gRPC API

If you want to manually invoke one of the gRPC APIs, you can use any gRPC CLI client; a good one is 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 make your first contribution.

Architecture and Technical Documenation

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