Now Available: The Flight SQL Plugin for Grafana

By Gary Fowler / Use Cases, Developer
Apr 25, 2023

Today we have exciting news for Grafana customers with Flight SQL data sources: Now there is a new community plugin available for Grafana that allows it to communicate with Flight-SQL-compatible databases.

Flight SQL is a client-server protocol developed by the Apache Arrow community for interacting with SQL databases. It utilizes the Flight RPC framework and the Arrow in-memory columnar format.

InfluxDB 3.0 supports Flight SQL, which means that you can now use this community plugin to query an InfluxDB 3.0 database. InfluxDB 3.0 is available for new accounts utilizing InfluxDB Cloud Serverless and InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated.

InfluxData helped develop this Grafana plugin in an effort to advance the open source Apache Arrow project, and all products that utilize Apache Arrow and Flight SQL should be able to take advantage of it.

Setting up Grafana Cloud to use Flight SQL is simple

First, select the “+Connect data” button:

Then choose Integrations: Click the “View All” button and then type “Flight” in the search bar:

Next, click on the Flight SQL tile to install the plugin:

To configure the plugin, enter your hostname and port and paste in your API token. Then configure the key and value for your metadata. This consists of ‘bucket-name’ and the actual name of the bucket/database that you are trying to access:

Once you have everything configured, you can start querying data in InfluxDB using SQL and create visualizations using your new data source.

A big thank you to our friends at Grafana for publishing this community plugin for Flight SQL customers.

To try it for yourself, sign up for a free InfluxDB account today.