Fully agreed on having that SQL experience guiding you on a totally reasonable solution.
However; our problem space is not high cardinality data; it more closely aligns to the first performance comparison with 10 devices and 10 metrics. The ease of getting high performance with pre implemented functions is great for us. Reliability is obviously a concern, and I can agree that if data is sacred, then choosing something built on Postgres is going to be a better thought.
Again, this is just our problem space; small scale deployments on many machines with no preexisting RDMS, low cardinality data, etc. I think it’d be a different story if we were huge, but for us, InfluxDB provides some seriously handy feature and is worth consideration if your problem is similar.
We totally hear you that usability and the developer experience is super important, especially when starting out.
One project we launched earlier this year "Timescale Analytics" actually seeks to address exactly this, e.g., bring more useful features and easier programmability to SQL [1] and you can see (or add) to the discussion on github [2].
Also informed by some of the super helpful functions we've seen in PromQL. And by the way, if you are interested in PromQL, we have 100% compatibility with PromQL through Promscale [3], which provides an observability platform for Prometheus data (built on TimescaleDB).
However; our problem space is not high cardinality data; it more closely aligns to the first performance comparison with 10 devices and 10 metrics. The ease of getting high performance with pre implemented functions is great for us. Reliability is obviously a concern, and I can agree that if data is sacred, then choosing something built on Postgres is going to be a better thought.
Again, this is just our problem space; small scale deployments on many machines with no preexisting RDMS, low cardinality data, etc. I think it’d be a different story if we were huge, but for us, InfluxDB provides some seriously handy feature and is worth consideration if your problem is similar.