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Rust in Production

InfluxData with Paul Dix

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.
01:08:38

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Quick takeaways

  • InfluxDB was created to fill the gap in time series databases by addressing shortcomings in existing solutions like Graphite and focusing on specific use cases.
  • The development of InfluxDB transitioned from Go to Rust to enhance performance, concurrency, and error handling, resulting in significantly improved ingestion speeds and query processing times.

Deep dives

Origins and Evolution of InfluxDB

InfluxDB was created to address a gap in time series databases, which arose in 2013 when existing solutions like Graphite were insufficient. The initial venture by Paul Dix and his co-founder focused on SaaS metrics using a combination of Scala and Cassandra but was ultimately redirected towards developing a robust time series database. This pivot was driven by observations that numerous companies were struggling to implement their own time series databases while existing open-source options had significant limitations. The founding team quickly built a prototype of InfluxDB, which garnered immediate interest due to its targeted approach to handling time series data.

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