How Time Series Databases Work—and Where They Don’t

Alex Vondrak:

In my previous post, we explored why Honeycomb is implemented as a distributed column store. Just as interesting to consider, though, is why Honeycomb is not implemented in other ways. So in this post, we’re going to dive into the topic of time series databases (TSDBs)and why Honeycomb couldn’t be limited to a TSDB implementation.

If you’ve used a traditional metrics dashboard, you’ve used a time series database. Even though metrics are cheap to generate, they were historically quite costly to store. TSDBs are therefore ubiquitous nowadays because they’re specifically optimized for metrics storage. However, there are some things they aren’t designed to handle: