Migrate data to Timescale from InfluxDB

You can migrate data to Timescale from InfluxDB using the Outflux tool. Outflux is an open source tool built by Timescale for fast, seamless migrations. It pipes exported data directly to Timescale, and manages schema discovery, validation, and creation.

Important

Outflux works with earlier versions of InfluxDB. It does not work with InfluxDB version 2 and later.

Before you start, make sure you have:

• A running instance of InfluxDB and a means to connect to it.
• An installation of Timescale 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 importing sample data.

To import data from Outflux, follow these procedures:

1. Install Outflux
2. Import sample data to InfluxDB if you don't have existing data.
3. Discover, validate, and transfer schema to Timescale (optional)
4. Migrate data to Timescale

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

Installing Outflux

1. Go to the releases section of the Outflux repository.
2. Download the latest compressed tarball for your platform.
3. Extract it to a preferred location.

Note

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

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

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.

Importing sample data into InfluxDB

1. Download the sample data:

   Outflux taxi data

2. Use the Influx CLI client to load the data into InfluxDB.

   influx -import -path=outflux_taxi.txt -database=outflux_tutorial

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   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 Timescale 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 migrate section. Use this section if you want to validate and transfer your schema independently of data migration.

To transfer your schema from InfluxDB to Timescale, run outflux schema-transfer:

outflux schema-transfer <DATABASE_NAME> <INFLUX_MEASUREMENT_NAME> \
--input-server=http://localhost:8086 \
--output-conn="dbname=tsdb user=tsdbadmin"

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To transfer all measurements from the database, leave out the measurement name argument.

Note

This example uses the postgres user and database to connect to the Timescale database. For other connection options and configuration, see the Outflux Github repo.

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

• ValidateOnly: checks that Timescale 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 Timescale tables. To transfer tags and fields as a single JSONB column, use the flag --tags-as-json.

Transfer your schema and migrate your data all at once with the migrate command.

For example, run:

outflux migrate <DATABASE_NAME> <INFLUX_MEASUREMENT_NAME> \
--input-server=http://localhost:8086 \
--output-conn="dbname=tsdb user=tsdbadmin"

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The schema strategy and connection options are the same as for schema-transfer. For more information, see the schema-transfer section.

In addition, outflux migrate also takes the following flags:

• --limit: Pass a number, N, to --limit to export only the first N rows, ordered by time.
• --from and to: Pass a timestamp to --from or --to to specify a time window of data to migrate.
• chunk-size: Changes the size of data chunks transferred. Data is pulled from the InfluxDB server in chunks of default size 15 000.
• batch-size: Changes the number of rows in an insertion batch. Data is inserted into Timescale in batches that are 8000 rows by default.

For more flags, see the Github documentation for outflux migrate. Alternatively, see the command line help:

outflux migrate --help

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