Migrate data to TimescaleDB from InfluxDB

important

Outflux works with earlier versions of InfluxDB. It does not work with InfluxDB 2.X.

Before you start, make sure you have:

A running instance of InfluxDB and a means to connect to it.
An installation of TimescaleDB and a means to connect to it.
Data in your InfluxDB instance. If you need to import some sample data for a test, see the instructions for .

Procedures

To import data from Outflux, follow these procedures:

Import sample data to InfluxDB if you don’t have existing data.
to TimescaleDB (optional)
Migrate data to TimescaleDB

Install Outflux from the GitHub repository. There are builds for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

Go to the of the Outflux repository.
Download the latest compressed tarball for your platform.

note

If you prefer to build Outflux from source, see the for instructions.

To get help with Outflux, you can run from the directory where you installed it.

Import sample data into InfluxDB

If you don’t have an existing InfluxDB database, or if you want to test on a sample instance, you can try Outflux by importing sample data. We provide an example file with data written in the Influx Line Protocol.

Outflux taxi data
Use the to load the data into InfluxDB.

This command imports the data into a new database named outflux_tutorial.

note

The sample data has no timestamp, so the time of the Influx server is used at data insert. All data points belong to one measurement, taxi. The points are tagged with location, rating, and vendor. Four fields are recorded: fare, mta_tax, tip, and tolls. The Influx client assumes the server is available at http://localhost:8086.

Outflux can:

Discover the schema of an InfluxDB measurement
Validate whether a TimescaleDB table exists that can hold the transferred data
Create a new table to satisfy the schema requirements if no valid table exists

note

Outflux’s migrate command does schema transfer and data migration in one step. For more information, see the section. Use this section if you want to validate and transfer your schema independently of data migration.

To transfer your schema from InfluxDB to TimescaleDB, run :

note

This example uses the postgres user and database to connect to the TimescaleDB database. For other connection options and configuration, see the .

Outflux’s schema-transfer can use 1 of 4 schema strategies:

ValidateOnly: checks that TimescaleDB is installed and that the specified database has a properly partitioned hypertable with the correct columns, but doesn’t perform modifications
CreateIfMissing: runs the same checks as ValidateOnly, and creates and properly partitions any missing hypertables
DropAndCreate: drops any existing table with the same name as the measurement, and creates a new hypertable and partitions it properly
DropCascadeAndCreate: performs the same action as DropAndCreate, and also executes a cascade table drop if there is an existing table with the same name as the measurement

You can specify your schema strategy by passing a value to the --schema-strategy option in the schema-transfer command. The default strategy is CreateIfMissing.

By default, each tag and field in InfluxDB is treated as a separate column in your TimescaleDB tables. To transfer tags and fields as a single JSONB column, use the flag .