TSDB and blockchain

Dear friends, we meet again , With the promotion of blockchain Technology , Many enterprises are also thinking about whether to apply it . Actually TSDB It has a lot in common with blockchain , In this issue Jesse Let's talk to you TSDB Block chain . This paper refers to Nicolas Hourcard The article “You Don’t Need a Blockchain, You Need a Time-Series Database”. 

This article only represents personal views , If there is bias , Please ask Hai Han. ～  

The use of blockchain technology in enterprise applications has grown rapidly in recent years . In theory , Blockchain technology can provide cross industry support , From real estate to financial services , From big health industry to supply chain management . However , This is not the case , Relevant surveys show that , There is only 14% The blockchain project of has passed POC, Put into production . It also makes us think , Do enterprise applications really need blockchain blessing ？

About Blockchain

Let's first briefly review what blockchain is . First , Blockchain is a database that stores information over time , It also introduces a completely decentralized consensus mechanism . Let's take bitcoin as an example , It can validate financial transactions between participants , And no need to help independent third parties （ Bypassed the intermediary ）. In this network , Anyone will be a part of it , They can all decide whether the deal is valid . Once the transaction is validated , This transaction will also be added to the new transaction block . Then each new block is added to the blockchain . In this way , We have achieved the goal that the same digital currency will not be consumed many times . meanwhile , Because anyone can participate in and verify the transaction , Therefore, this network is considered as an unauthorized network . Public 、 Blockchain without license provides us with a new perspective in decentralization .

We should admit that , For digital currency , A peer-to-peer framework that is open to everyone is indeed innovative . But for enterprises, this is not entirely the case , Because many enterprises do not want to disclose their sensitive records , And they only want to allow a few trusted users to have approval rights . in other words Most enterprise applications do not need to be decentralized in the first place , It is better to provide services by a centralized database with a single point , Therefore, this decentralized blockchain organization requires enterprises to carefully weigh and choose . The main disadvantage of blockchain is ： First , It lacks scalability . The etheric fang —— The foundation of enterprise blockchain , On average, it can only process 15 transaction . This is far from the needs of enterprises —— A single database can read millions of data points per second . secondly , Because blockchain needs to rely on resource intensive consensus mechanism , Therefore, it will lead to more processing overhead and higher energy consumption .

TSDB Block chain

in fact ,TSDB It has many common attributes with enterprise blockchain . First , Both are based on time . In blockchain , Blocks are added to the chain at regular intervals , This means that for each block of data , It will be associated with a timestamp . And in the TSDB in , Because it is optimized for time , So we can effectively query and retrieve the data related to timestamp . such as , We can imagine , The stock price changes every hour and every second . secondly , Both have invariance . In the world of blockchain , Once the block is added to the chain , We can't change . This is in the field of databases , Similar to can “ Insert ”, But there is no “ Delete ” or “ to update ” The function of . stay TSDB in , Replace the operation of update , We just need to add the latest data （ Recent data is more often read ）. Last , Both can support long address format （256 A bit ）. In blockchain , This is the format of cryptocurrency public address . stay TSDB in , We can also build better data types than strings , To support writing and reading blockchain addresses more effectively .

So we can use TSDB Reproduce the complete history of a single completed transaction by time . This is actually how blockchain nodes work , Their similarity lies in ： First of all , Data replication . Each node in the blockchain keeps the whole transaction history . If a node is destroyed , We rely on other nodes to provide complete history . Again , This concept has existed in traditional databases for decades , If a database fails , We may need another database as a backup . second , Consensus . Blockchain has many parties （ That is node ） Agree on specific transactions . There are Raft and Paxos And so on , Similar to the voting mechanism . Third , Fragmentation . Instead of letting all nodes calculate all operations to verify transactions and execute smart contracts , Instead, the allocation node only handles some calculations . Database sharding divides large databases into smaller chunks , To facilitate horizontal expansion across multiple servers .

Taken together , For most enterprises , If decentralization is not necessary , Then a centralized database with a single point of service is a better storage solution . If time is the mainstay of these enterprises , that TSDB Will be their best choice .

CnosDB brief introduction

CnosDB It's a high performance 、 High usability open source distributed time series database , It has been officially released and fully open source .

Welcome to our code warehouse , One key, three links ：https://github.com/cnosdb/cnosdb