InfluxDB 3: Fully Available for the Future of Time Series

By Evan Kaplan / Product
Jan 13, 2025

Today, we are announcing the public alpha of the newest additions to the InfluxDB 3 time series database product line: InfluxDB 3 Core, our latest open source product, and InfluxDB 3 Enterprise, a commercial version built on Core that provides enhanced functionality for enterprise-scale applications.

It’s been more than four years since we began the journey to rebuild the core of InfluxDB. Today, with the introduction of the open source and enterprise versions, we are excited to extend the product line to a much broader base of community users and customers. This product line represents the embodiment of a decade of expertise in addressing the complexities of managing time series data at scale. InfluxDB 3 delivers products capable of handling high-speed, high-cardinality data from the edge to the cloud, supporting critical use cases in observability, IoT/IIoT, and real-time monitoring and control.

Time series: the foundation for AI and intelligent systems

Time series data is everywhere, capturing the pulse of our connected world and powering the digital and physical systems we rely on. Every connected device and application generates a relentless stream of time series data that, when collected and analyzed, serves as the foundation for training AI models that learn, adapt, and operate autonomously.

Analyzing data through the lens of time reveals patterns and trends that unlock predictions, enable automation, and drive real-time decision-making. High-resolution time series data doesn’t just reflect what happened; it provides critical context for detection and response, driving systems that learn and adapt autonomously.

Managing this data at scale is inherently challenging, but InfluxDB 3 is purpose-built to meet the real-time requirements of time series data. From ingesting data from millions of sensors to performing complex, high-speed queries, InfluxDB 3 moves systems from reactive to proactive, transforming data points into actionable, real-time intelligence.

Today, we are taking another bold step toward this vision with the public alpha release of the next InfluxDB 3 products, delivering the performance and scalability required to handle even the most demanding time series workloads.

Introducing InfluxDB 3 Core & Enterprise

InfluxDB 3 Core represents a new paradigm in time series data management: a high-performance recent data engine that delivers exceptional performance for real-time monitoring, data collection, and streaming analytics use cases. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise builds on Core’s foundation by adding historical analysis and data compaction capabilities for efficient querying across any time range, along with enterprise-grade features such as read replicas, high availability, scalability, and enhanced security.

Both Core and Enterprise can run as single-node software that’s easy to set up and run, giving developers an operationally simple database to manage high-resolution data. This announcement extends the InfluxDB 3 product line, making it available in early alpha for developers to bring high performance to even the most demanding time series data workloads.

The journey to InfluxDB 3

InfluxDB 3 represents a fundamental reimagining of what a time series platform can deliver: transforming high-resolution data into actionable intelligence that underpins today’s systems and applications. When we set out to build this new generation of InfluxDB, we didn’t just aim to improve performance; we addressed the seismic shifts happening in how data is collected, transformed, and acted upon.

This required a bold decision to completely re-engineer InfluxDB:

• We rewrote the core engine in Rust, a cutting-edge programming language for performance, and re-engineered it to be columnar, delivering orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and compression.
• We embraced, contributed to, and invested in open standards like Apache Arrow, DataFusion, and Parquet, ensuring interoperability and flexibility.
• We designed for the future, building a platform that scales seamlessly to meet the demands of high-volume time series data that powers real-time systems, predictive analytics, and real-world AI applications.
• We developed a product that could be deployed across multiple environments and truly meets developers where and how they want to build.
• We recognized the emergence of lakehouses as the “workbenches” for model building and analytical workloads and architected a real-time operational database built around a shared file system with zero ETL.

The result is a platform powered by a high-performance columnar database engine and engineered to address these challenges and set a new benchmark for time series management:

• High-speed ingest to capture high-frequency data from multiple sources
• Real-time querying to analyze millions of data points per second
• Separation of compute and storage to balance cost and performance, even as data volumes scale
• Unlimited cardinality to analyze massive volumes of high-resolution data without limits
• Native SQL and broader ecosystem compatibility for seamless integration with popular BI tools without needing to learn a new language

The InfluxDB 3 product line

With InfluxDB 3, we’re delivering on a vision to support developers across every environment—cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. Our goal is to provide the right product for every need and use case so developer and enterprises can build and deploy on their terms:

• Fully managed InfluxDB 3: For businesses that need high performance at scale. With fully managed operations, seamless scaling, and enterprise-grade security, our pay-as-you-go and enterprise-grade fully managed products are ideal for cloud-first organizations.
• Self-managed InfluxDB 3: Built for teams requiring full control, our self-managed product delivers high performance and flexibility for large-scale deployments. Run it on-premises, in private clouds, or self-managed public clouds, with Kubernetes-based containers and independently scalable ingest and query tiers.
• Simple set up InfluxDB 3 (in early alpha): InfluxDB 3 Core and Enterprise bring the capabilities of InfluxDB 3 to the developer masses. With a simple, single-node set up with Core or Enterprise, and a multi-node set up with Enterprise that can run with or without Kubernetes, InfluxDB 3 can be deployed in seconds with uncompromising performance.

Built on the FDAP stack: open source at our core

InfluxDB 3 Core continues our commitment to permissive open source software, dual-licensed under either MIT or Apache 2. We believe permissive open source is the key to building a vibrant community—the kind that drives real innovation. It’s not just about licensing; it’s a core principle that shapes how we build and evolve our technology.

InfluxDB 3 is built on the FDAP stack—Apache Arrow Flight, Apache DataFusion, Apache Arrow, and Apache Parquet—all foundational technologies under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As we developed InfluxDB 3, one of our guiding principles was to embrace open source wherever possible so we could build around a larger community and accelerate platform maturity with more features and functionality.

The results speak for themselves. Since we began working on InfluxDB 3 nearly five years ago, we’ve played a critical role in advancing Apache DataFusion into a high-performance columnar query engine. Performance has long been a central focus for the DataFusion community, and this emphasis on speed has attracted significant contributions from a growing and active community. Today, DataFusion stands as a Top-Level Project within the ASF, a milestone achieved in part thanks to InfluxData’s substantial contributions and recently earned recognition as the fastest engine for querying Apache Parquet files.

This focus on open standards and performance underpins the entire InfluxDB 3 product suite. By building around these technologies, we’re putting our open source efforts into these standards—often leading these upstream projects—delivering a highly performant platform that combines speed, flexibility, and interoperability, enabling developers to meet the demands of modern time series workloads.

Looking ahead

Today’s announcement and availability of the full InfluxDB 3 product line marks a pivotal step in simplifying the complexity of managing massive time series data volumes. As data grows in scale, speed, and complexity, platforms must evolve. InfluxDB 3 is built to meet this challenge head-on.

This release is fundamentally about putting developers first. InfluxDB 3 simplifies the complexity of managing time series data, staying true to our Time to Awesome ethos: less overhead, less friction, and more time for developers to focus on what matters most—building solutions that drive impact.

To our incredible community of developers and customers: thank you. Your feedback and innovation fuel everything we do. If you’re new to InfluxDB, now is the perfect time to start. Time series data is everywhere, underpinning the systems that power our world. InfluxDB 3 transforms this data into real-time intelligence, giving developers the tools to manage today’s challenges efficiently and build tomorrow’s innovations.

We’re ready for the journey ahead and look forward to being part of yours.