During an online InfluxDays North America 2021 Virtual Experience conference, InfluxData today expanded the capabilities of its application development tools using its Flux query language on top of its time-series database.

The company has enhanced its InfluxDB Notebooks tool to enable developers to quickly set up an alert, build a task or write a Flux script without having to leave their browser.

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In addition, developers can compose Flux queries to be included in client code that can then be autogenerated within applications written in more than 10 different programming languages. There is now also an extension of Visual Studio Code that makes it simpler to create Flux scripts, query InfluxDB, create Flux tasks and manage buckets.

Finally, InfluxData added the ability to explicitly define the schema of a bucket within InfluxDB to safeguard against unwanted changes; an application programming interface (API) tool, dubbed API Invocable Scripts, to make it simpler to define parameterized Flux scripts and the ability to send notifications from Alerta, WebEx Teams and ServiceNow to the InfluxDB Cloud platform.

Tim Hall, vice president of product for InfluxData, said the overall goal is to reduce the level of complexity developers encounter when building applications that run on a time-series database. Many of those applications are now core to digital business transformation initiatives that require data to processed and analyzed over time. In effect, time-stamped data adds yet another dimension to any application, noted Hall.

Time-series databases are typically employed by either an independent software vendor (ISV) to create, for example, a monitoring application, or an enterprise IT team that is building an application that lends itself to data that needs to be tracked over some period of time.

In most instances, applications built on a time-series database are being deployed alongside, for example, relational databases that are generally invoked using SQL. As a result, InfluxDB has made it simpler to join data across relational and time-series data via SQL integrations the company added to Flux, noted Hall.

DevOps teams, of course, are not always anxious to add another database they need to support, but as applications continue to evolve, more organizations are employing a mix of purpose-built databases to develop applications as the volume of data that organizations are trying to manage and analyze continues to grow.

In the longer term, it’s clear time-series databases will play a critical role in driving digital business transformation initiatives. The challenge most organizations are now struggling with is determining which of these initiatives to prioritize. A time-series database coupled with the developer tools provided by InfluxData will enable IT teams to build the applications that drive those processes much faster, said Hall.

In the meantime, IT teams would be well advised to at least become more familiar with time-series databases, because knowing the time when an event occurred is becoming a bigger application requirement. After all, knowing when something happened is now just as important as the record of what actually occurred.