mysqlraspberry-piraspberry-pi2influxdbopentsdb

Choosing a TSDB for one-off smart-home installation


I'm building a one-off smart-home data collection box. It's expected to run on a raspberry-pi-class machine (~1G RAM), handling about 200K data points per day (each a 64-bit int). We've been working with vanilla MySQL, but performance is starting to crumble, especially for queries on the number of entries in a given time interval.

As I understand it, this is basically exactly what time-series databases are designed for. If anything, the unusual thing about my situation is that the volume is relatively low, and so is the amount of RAM available.

A quick look at Wikipedia suggests OpenTSDB, InfluxDB, and possibly BlueFlood. OpenTSDB suggests 4G of RAM, though that may be for high-volume settings. InfluxDB actually mentions sensor readings, but I can't find a lot of information on what kind of resources are required.

Okay, so here's my actual question: are there obvious red flags that would make any of these systems inappropriate for the project I describe?

I realize that this is an invitation to flame, so I'm counting on folks to keep it on the bright and helpful side. Many thanks in advance!


Solution

  • InfluxDB should be fine with 1 GB RAM at that volume. Embedded sensors and low-power devices like Raspberry Pi's are definitely a core use case, although we haven't done much testing with the latest betas beyond compiling on ARM.

    InfluxDB 0.9.0 was just released, and 0.9.x should be available in our Hosted environment in a few weeks. The low end instances have 1 GB RAM and 1 CPU equivalent, so they are a reasonable proxy for your Pi performance, and the free trial lasts two weeks.

    If you have more specific questions, please reach out to us at influxdb@googlegroups.com or support@influxdb.com and we'll see hwo we can help.