What are the implications of writing data to InfluxDB with timestamps in TAI instead of UTC?

1

Our project adopted TAI (International Atomic Time) as the time scale for timestamps instead of UTC to avoid problems with leap seconds.

TAI is currently 37 seconds ahead of UTC.

If instead of UTC we use TAI as the InfluxDB timestamp, what are the implications?

From the top of my head, we would have some unexpected issues

  • if I use now() in a query that would be UTC thus 37s earlier.
  • the conversion from UTC to Local time (the button introduced in Chronograf 1.7.13) would also be off by 37s

are there other implications?

PS. for this application, in particular, we don’t use Telegraf, we have our own client that collects the data and writes to InfluxDB.

Thanks and I would very much appreciate your comments on this.
best,
Angelo

2

Hi,

This definitely isn’t my area of expertise, but I don’t foresee any problems. InfluxDB stores timestamps as nanoseconds UTC.

InfluxDB doesn’t mind writing points in the future, which you’ll essentially be doing.

You’ll need your own client side logic to shift as TAI continues to leap ahead.