Release Announcement: InfluxDB 1.8.0 with Long-Awaited Features

By Tim Hall / Product
Apr 15, 2020

The latest open source release of InfluxDB is available now.

• InfluxDB 1.8.0 — release notes

Key feature highlights from the InfluxDB release include:

Flux v0.65 ready for production use

• Flux is now available for interactive query within the 1.8 release of InfluxDB, and we believe it is now ready for production workloads.
• Direct access is available through the API and via the InfluxCLI, which now includes a Flux Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) as well.
• Flux delivers on a number of long-outstanding feature requests for InfluxDB. If you haven't checked out Flux, now is the time. Included in its ever-expanding capabilities are:
  • Join data residing in multiple measurements, buckets, or data sources
  • Perform mathematical operations using data gathered across measurements/databases
  • Window and aggregate based on calendar months, years
  • Manipulate Strings through an extensive library of string related functions
  • Shape data through pivot() and other functions
  • Group based on any data column: tags, fields, etc.
  • Join data across InfluxDB and non-InfluxDB sources
  • Cast booleans to integers
  • Support for geohashes and geo-temporal data (experimental)
• That is really just the beginning. We will continue to work on performance and additional functions.
• Additionally, we're evaluating the need for Flux query management controls equivalent to existing InfluxQL query management controls.
• Please join the discussion about Flux on InfluxCommunity, Slack, or GitHub.

Forward compatibility

• InfluxDB 2.0 API compatibility endpoints are now part of the InfluxDB 1.x line.
• This allows you to leverage the new InfluxDB 2.0 client libraries for both reading data with Flux and writing data as well.
• Take advantage of the latest client libraries while readying your implementation for a move to InfluxDB 2.0 Cloud when you're ready to scale.

Operational improvements

• You can now connect to a custom HTTP endpoint using -url-prefix in the influx CLI. This allows the influx CLI to connect to an InfluxDB instance running behind a reverse proxy with a custom subpath / endpoint.
• You can now use influx_inspect to check the integrity of tombstone files in addition to its existing capabilities.
• We've also added support for an offline series compaction capability to influx_inspect buildtsi. If you're currently using the Time Series Index (tsi1), the index files grow over time and aren't automatically compacted. This enhancement enables an administrator to perform a compaction while the database is offline.

Security enhancements

• This release adds support for TLS 1.3 configuration and updates the current list of Go ciphers as well.
• Additional support has been provided for bound parameters when queries are submitted to prevent injection attacks.

The binaries for the latest open source release can be found on our downloads page.

The InfluxDB Enterprise 1.8 release will be tested within the InfluxDB Cloud 1 environment first. Based on the successful rollout within InfluxDB Cloud, we will release this version later this month. Stay tuned!

If you find issues or have questions, please join our InfluxDB Community Slack, post them in our InfluxDB Github Repo or our Community Site, and we will take a look.