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by nemothekid 2052 days ago
>What I find interesting is that this project is already almost a year old and only has six contributors

I don't think this is a fair criticism. Postgres only has 7 core contributors - and influxDB is far less complex targeting a much simpler use case.

1 comments

PostgreSQL might have only seven people on the "core team", but the active contributors list is much longer: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers

Furthermore, hundreds of people have been responsible for its development over the years: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

As an additional, possibly more relevant example - the Cortex project has 158 contributors: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex

My larger point is that, in contrast with the new project, InfluxDB currently has ~400 contributors. I'm certain that many dozens of those were involved in getting the current storage engine to a stable place. And now that hard work is on a path to being deprecated by moving to a completely new language and set of underlying technologies.

Taking the project from a handful of contributors to a production-ready technology within an existing ecosystem is a non-trivial task. I'm sure it will come together eventually, but the commitment to ship it "early next year" seems unlikely to me.

We'll be producing builds early next year. Those won't be anything we're recommending for production. Our goal is to have an early alpha in our own cloud environment by the end of Q1. I stress alpha. But we'll also have a bunch of tooling around it (which we've already built for the other parts of our cloud product) to backup data out of band, monitor it, shadow test it against production workloads, etc.

We're also building on top of the work of a bunch of others that have built Arrow and libraries within the Rust ecosystem.

When the open source GAs, I don't really know. But we're doing this out in the open so people can see, comment, and maybe even contribute. Who knows, maybe after a few years you'll be a convert ;)