Announcing InfluxDB v0.9.6 - Updates to the TSM Storage Engine

By Paul Dix / Product
Dec 08, 2015

We’re releasing InfluxDB v0.9.6 today which includes 8 features and 22 bug fixes. While we’ve largely been focused on longer term development goals for the release after this one, the community of external contributors has rolled up their sleeves and contributed half of the improvements going into 0.9.6! This release includes a major revision of the TSM storage engine, getting it even closer to being production ready. Read on for details on testing the new storage engine, what this release means for you, and what the next few months of InfluxDB development have in store.

The TSM storage engine

Two months ago we announced we were working on a storage engine purpose built for time series data - the Time Structured Merge Tree. It achieves significantly better throughput and compression than any previous version of InfluxDB. We put it out for testing in the community and have received great feedback, bug reports, and performance testing.

We’ve been iterating based on that feedback and testing including our own testing in AWS, Digital Ocean, and on bare-metal here in the lab. The result of all this is a more robust design and implementation that we’re releasing today with InfluxDB 0.9.6.

If you’ve been testing the TSM engine in earlier releases, upgrading will require you to start with a fresh database. This version is still for testing purposes only. However, if you’re in development mode, you should be testing against TSM as that’s what will be shipping with the next InfluxDB release. You’ll need to set a special configuration flag to enable TSM since it’s not ready for production use. See the sample configuration file for using the TSM storage engine.

Over the course of the next 7 weeks we’ll be finishing the few remaining features, like online backups and the migration tool for our previous storage engines. Most of our efforts will focus on testing and performance. We’ll be doing things like trying to write in bogus data, crashing the server in the middle of operations like compactions, writes and queries and generally doing everything we can to battle harden it.

We’ll be writing up more details about the updated TSM storage engine along with some performance numbers in the coming weeks. In the meantime, test it out and compare performance characteristics with other time series storage solutions. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

You can get the latest 0.9.6 release from our Downloads page.

What this release means for you

If you’re currently running a version of 0.9.x, you’ll want to upgrade as there are many bug fixes and some new features. If you’re a user with higher write throughput or compression needs, you’ll want to start testing this release with the TSM storage engine enabled.

If you’re an 0.8 user looking to upgrade, you’ll want to start testing this release with the TSM storage engine enabled. The next release will have the TSM engine enabled by default, which will mark the point when you should upgrade as the 0.8x branch is deprecated.

Future work and the next release

We’ll be releasing version 0.10.0 of InfluxDB at the end of January. This version will use the TSM storage engine and will give users the ability to upgrade their 0.9.x database using older storage engines. We’re also putting major effort into the clustering implementation for the 0.10.0 release which should be at Beta status.

We decided to make the next version 0.10.0 because it’s a significant enough release to warrant a new version bump. Bumping the version also makes support easier since anyone telling us they are on 0.10.0 will be running the TSM storage engine.

There will be no breaking API changes in the 0.10.0 release. Libraries that work with 0.9.3 and above will work with 0.10.0. Any API updates will be additive.

Our future release cadence will then slow to a new revision every 2 months with patch releases in between for bug fixes.

Want to give it a try?

You can download InfluxDB or sign up for a free trial of our managed InfluxDB + Grafana service in the cloud. (Note: The managed hosting platform is still running 0.9.5.1, but will be upgraded to 0.9.6 later this week.)

We also offer expert professional services for help with InfluxDB, feature requests, performance tuning, and advanced configurations. Check out our Services and Subscriptions page to learn how we can accelerate your time-series project.