The internet of things was kickstarted by a modified soda machine that made sure Carnegie Mellon computer science grad students never went without a cold caffeine fix. Forty years later, there are some 12 billion connected devices across the world.

Valued at $478.36 billion in 2021, the IoT market is predicted to grow at a 26.4% compound annual growth rate to reach $2,465.26 billion by 2029. Driving this market growth is the increase in devices, systems and applications that generate the copious and ever-increasing amounts of time-stamp data that drives digital business operations.

Real-time accessibility to this data is often essential and always useful, both for immediate decisions and for sequential performance tracking over time. Traditional relational databases struggle under such demands, so time-series database systems, or TSDBs, were developed to enable fast and accurate real-time management of cloud scale data.

On May 17, at 9:00 a.m. PT, InfluxData Inc. and theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, are hosting an event focused on how TSDBs can unlock the potential of the IoT. (* Disclosure below.)

InfluxDB wins the TSDBS popularity sweepstakes

During the “The Future is Built on InfluxDB” event, InfluxData executives and customers will explain the technology behind InfluxDB and demonstrate how time-series data make a difference on Earth — and in space.

“Successfully managing data from connected devices requires solutions that are lightweight, resilient and scalable,” according to Rachel Stephens, senior analyst for industry analyst firm RedMonk. “Time-series data provides crucial context in industrial and IoT settings. InfluxData aims to help its customers better understand the data from their connected devices.”

Although time-series database management systems represent only a tiny segment of the overall database market, they have seen a 640% increase in adoption since 2013, second only to graph databases, according to data collected by the DB-Engines knowledge base. Between May 2020 and today, TSDBs beat out all other databases with a 146% leap in popularity.

Holding the top position for time-series database management systems is InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database management system developed by InfluxData Inc. Competing against TSDBs such as Kdb+, Prometheus, Graphite, TimescaleDB and Amazon Timestream, InfluxDB holds a comfortable 20-point lead over its nearest competitor and is currently gaining traction in the market.

IoT use cases are where purpose-built time-series databases come to the forefront. InfluxData differentiates in the market with its focus on making it easy to build the tools that end users really need, according to company executives. InfluxDB was purpose-built as a time-series database and is implemented solely through APIs. The database is designed to work as a system with InfluxData’s Telegraf metric and event collection and reporting agent and Kapacitor real-time streaming engine with Chronograf acting as an interface for the time-series platform. Together InfluxData’s solutions abstract the complexity of developing for the IoT and enable developers to simply and quickly build custom interfaces that meet end-users’ specific criteria.

Just how easy this is becomes apparent on Twitter, with developers posting how they have used InfluxDB to create custom dashboards for their personal use.

“What we’re seeing is time series is becoming the new paradigm,” Arwa Kaddoura, chief revenue officer at InfluxData, told theCUBE during an interview at AWS re:Invent 2021. “People are generating these large volumes of data and need a platform that can ingest millions of points per second.”

Why time matters in the interconnected world

InfluxData’s InfluxDB is a high-speed read and write database, meaning that customers can simultaneously read and apply machine learning models to data in real time. This ability to predict and detect anomalies in real time ups the security monitoring game significantly. It also allows companies to cross-reference market fluctuations with events, providing a contextual record and enabling more accurate predictions.

Alongside the ability to provide almost instantaneous access to time frame-specific data, TSDBs enable long-term assessment. This is especially useful for environmental monitoring and other studies that require large amounts of data to be ingested over a timeframe that could last for decades. The European Council for Nuclear Research, more commonly known by the acronym CERN, is one of many research facilities that uses InfluxDB for data monitoring. According to senior software engineer Adam Wegrzynek, one data center at CERN uses 31 instances of InfluxDB, ingesting over 1.6TB of data daily.

“When you think about IoT and edge scale where things are happening super-fast, ingestion is coming from many different sources and analysis often needs to be done in real time or near real time,” said theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante.

Livestream of ‘The Future Is Built on InfluxDB’ event

“The Future Is Built on InfluxDB” event is a special virtual livestream from theCUBE and InfluxData. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage here on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of “The Future Is Built on InfluxDB” event, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

During “The Future Is Built on InfluxDB” event, theCUBE analysts will talk with InfluxData’s Evan Kaplan, chief executive officer; and Brian Gilmore, director of internet of things and emerging technologies; as well as Angelo Fausti, software engineer at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory; and Caleb MacLachlan, senior spacecraft operations software engineer with Loft Orbital Solutions Inc.

Event Update!

Check out our full event coverage, as well as post-event coverage, and the complete event video below:

(*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “The Future Is Built on InfluxDB” event. Neither InfluxData Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE