Product Update – Faster Data Explorer in Raw Data Mode and Improved Search for Multiple Measurements

By Bharat Bhat / Use Cases
Oct 20, 2022

We love to write and ship code to help developers bring their ideas and projects to life. That’s why we’re constantly working on improving our product to meet developers where they are, to ensure their happiness, and accelerate Time to Awesome.

This week, we are covering a product release that we think will help you use and govern your InfluxDB queries more efficiently.

Significant improvements in parsing and display time

When using the InfluxDB UI to perform queries – especially with large datasets or high cardinality – the queries would sometimes take a long time when trying to view the raw data or view in a simple table display. To solve this, we created a faster way to run queries by separating the actual query from the “display” of the query.

We now have the capability to run super fast raw data mode queries. In one of our test cases we reduced a 30 second parsing/display time down to 4 seconds. Enjoy the faster queries!

Multiple measurements

We made a change to the InfluxDB Cloud Data Explorer to enhance the capability to search for multiple measurements at the same time.

In the InfluxDB data model, you can think of measurements kind of like you would think of tables in SQL. Searching for multiple measurements at once or searching all measurements – especially when working with large datasets – can result in very large queries. We found that some users were not getting the performance they expected from these queries. However, for most users – and most use cases – if you were looking for something in a very specific measurement and if the measurement was selected first, instead of a field or tag, the queries were extremely fast.

Unfortunately, while this helped the majority of users, it didn’t help if you didn’t know your measurements before filtering on a field or tag, or you really needed to be able to select more than one measurement at once.

What’s changed?

To better address this use case, we have made two changes to the InfluxDB Cloud Data Explorer:

• You can select more than one measurement.

• If you need to search a field or tag value first, you can select “All Measurements” from the bottom of the list of measurements — this will then let you select a field or a tag.

Best practices

The new Script Editor still requires a single measurement selection to start your query. We are working to add multi-measurement support in the coming months. In the interim, you can simply comment out the filter statement for the measurement in the displayed Flux.

Despite making these changes to help existing users, it is still recommended to start your queries with a single measurement whenever possible. That is going to be your best performing query. As always, please remember to keep the InfluxDB hierarchy (Fields and Tags within Measurements, and Measurements within Buckets) in mind when designing your schemas.

Please reach out to us if you have any specific design or implementation questions. We are always here to help.