Continuing in our series of InfluxDays recaps, we turn our attention to Brian Gilmore’s presentation on Industrial IoT. This is an area that uses time series data extensively and has a lot of room to expand the way it uses this data. Here’s a quick breakdown of where things stand today.

Time series data often comes in large volumes that need to be handled carefully to produce insights in near real time. We’re constantly moving through time. The time it took you to read this sentence is now forever in the past, unchangeable. This leads to something unique about data with a time dimension: It can only go in one direction. Time series data is different from other data for many reasons.

At our recent InfluxDays event, Gary Fowler discussed the current state of scripting and query language support in InfluxDB. This is an aspect of the platform undergoing constant development, so here’s a quick recap of what Gary went over.

If you’ve been following InfluxDB, you’ve probably heard of InfluxDB IOx, the next evolution of the storage engine powering InfluxDB Cloud. However, I wanted to learn more about how the open source components of the new engine help achieve the requirements for the new InfluxDB engine and why they were chosen. This post covers that precise topic. We’ll also learn why InfluxDB chose to contribute to these open source projects and what our commitment to open source looks like today.

To a great extent, the value of the Internet of Things (IoT) is realized through the insights (data) generated from sensor data integrated in storage and analytics systems. Consequently, how the data integration is conducted directly impacts the success of IoT projects. For this reason, InfluxData introduced Native Collectors to bypass multiple data hops and enable one-step integration of data from data brokers such as HiveMQ MQTT broker into its InfluxDB Cloud time series database.

If you’re new to InfluxDB you might wonder, “Why does InfluxDB have its own query and scripting language (aka Flux)?” You might also be thinking, “InfluxDB has client libraries. Why and when should I use the Python client library and when should I use Flux?” In this post we’ll discuss when developers should use Flux and when they should use Python for developing their IoT applications.

This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. A Helm chart can simplify our lives and enable us to see what is happening with our K3s cluster using an external system. Lightweight Kubernetes, known as K3s, is an installation of Kubernetes half the size in terms of memory footprint. Do you need to monitor your nodes running K3s to know the status of your cluster?

We believe that querying data in Apache Parquet files directly can achieve similar or better storage efficiency and query performance than most specialized file formats. While it requires significant engineering effort, the benefits of Parquet’s open format and broad ecosystem support make it the obvious choice for a wide class of data systems.

Companies need to consider both how fast they can put edge applications into action and update them, and how quickly they can process incoming data. Industrial processes are becoming increasingly automated as sensors on machines collect a growing amount of data. Much of this data is time-stamped and can help companies improve processes. This large volume of sensor data can become unwieldy if companies don’t manage it properly.

At InfluxData, we pride ourselves on building a platform – InfluxDB – for developers, by developers. It’s not enough to simply “talk the talk.” As an engineering leader, it’s really important to me that InfluxData “walks the walk,” too. This requires a holistic understanding of our users, their familiarity with time series, the environments in which they work, and the problems they’re trying to solve.