Noobie questions

Welcome & Getting Started
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1

Hello Everyone

I would like to ask a few questions about influx.

First.
I’ve been using InfluxDB for a while now and have a pretty good amount of data stored.
Started with InfluxDB 1.x and not long ago i updated to Influx v2.4 OSS

I have a bucket with an infinite retention for now (I’m learning the flux language now and trying to get my head around tasks and downsampling data.)
But my basic problem is with tag cardinality
I used tags to store session and client IDs
Seemed to be a good idea … I thought if its “indexed” ill be able to query them quickly but the number of unique values started to grow.
I use Grafana to visualize data, and tried to use the ad-hoc filtering feature, but now that the unique values get out of hand the filter just hangs when i try to use it for those IDs.

I’ve heard some controversial information about the topic.
Can someone tell me what is the actual limitation of tag cardinality in the different versions of InfluxDB ?

I’m planning to switch to InfluxDB Cloud (pay as you go) in AWS and read that the maximum cardinality is 1M but also read somewhere that the new rust powered IOx engine (which is used in the cloud?!?) removes this limitation and basically you can have infinite cardinality without performace drop.

Will moving to the cloud help in my case or I need to reconstruct my data structure from the beginning?

Thanks

2

Hello @MrEvilcK,
Yes IOx will power all AWS InfluxDB Cloud instances by jan 31. SQL support will also be offered as well as unlimited cardinality. You also won’t have to worry what you cast as a field or a tag in Influx Cloud once IOx backs it, so your question won’t be relevant then.

As for right now, (in OSS 2.x and cloud) the limitation of tag cardinality is that it is possible to essentially over index and really high cardinality use cases will result in low performance and slower queries.

Does this answer all of your questions?

3

Hello @Anaisdg

Yes, that helps me a lot and thank you for clarifying!