[Mongoose]

Had me until claiming that InfluxDB was the first mainstream TSDB in 2013. OpenTSDB (2010)? Graphite (2008)? RRDtool (1999)?

Maybe Influx took off in a way these prior projects didn't, but people have been storing time series data for decades.

[osigurdson]

InfluxDB always seemed like it was run by children who are good at raising VC money.

[steveBK123]

Being familiar with both KDB and somewhat so with InfluxDB .. it strikes me as a challenging space. I suspect there just isn't much money in it.

Oddly InfluxDB has raised amounts of VC money approaching KDB parent companies current market cap. I know VC raised and market cap are not directly comparable, but what is the hoped-for enterprise value at exit of NewCo if the IncumbentCo is worth Z?

My take is that orgs with real revenue-generating time series data challenges, budget and dev staff to cook up solutions have long ago bought KDB licenses or rolled their own in-house column store.

Orgs using time series DBs for telemetry/observability/etc type of "back office" problems (where you are willing to downsample/conflate/offload history) either don't want to pay a dime, or want a fully formed SaaS solution with pretty GUI, alerting, etc like a DataDog they will like $10M/year to.

Not a lot of middle ground oddly.

[candiddevmike]

Eventually one of their rewrites will find product market fit.

[dijit]

Agreed, after trying to buy a commercial license from them I was left… wanting to avoid the company entirely.

[beagle3]

Also K (1993) and A+ (1988) although the former only became public in 1998 or so, and the latter in 2003 - they were only available inside Morgan Stanley in the beginning IIRC.

[jnordwick]

I was working in K2 in 1999, and it was public then. This is back when it had the built in GUI and dependency graph. I remember the first time somebody showed it to me, and I didn't think it was very impressive. It took about 2-3 months of messing with it before I realized how very wrong I was.

[PeterZaitsev]

I think While OpenTSDB was reasonably general purpose, Graphite and RRDTools were done for very specific monitoring use cases.

[IOT_Apprentice]

We used a customized version of OpenTSDB at eBay to do monitoring of everything on the platform, including the search infrastructure. This was during the time eBay built a private cloud.

[johnorourke]

RRDTool was the generalised version of the TSDB that was born for the specific use case, MRTG. It could be used for anything. Hopefully I've remembered that correctly!