Rust in Production InfluxData with Paul Dix
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Dec 14, 2023 Paul Dix, the CTO of InfluxData, discusses the inception of InfluxDB, a powerful open-source time series database. He shares the challenges faced in early development and the pivotal shift from Scala to Go. Dix highlights the advantages of transitioning to Rust, including enhanced performance and error handling. He elaborates on the significant upgrades from InfluxDB version 1.0 to 2.0, along with strategies for managing high data volumes. The importance of community contributions and ongoing learning in Rust completes this insightful conversation.
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From Failed SaaS To Open Source Database
- Paul Dix turned a failing SaaS product into InfluxDB by extracting the time-series backend and open-sourcing it.
- He prototyped the database in weeks and launched it publicly after meetup talks and Hacker News traction.
Inventing A Tailored Storage Engine
- Early InfluxDB used LevelDB then BoltDB before inventing TSM and TSI storage engines.
- Paul prototyped a time-structured merge tree in 2015 and shipped it in 2016, dramatically improving performance.
Architecture Trumps Language Choice
- Core database architecture choices are language-agnostic and driven by workload patterns.
- Paul says most architectural work would have been the same in C/C++ or Rust, not just Go.