Get started with InfluxDB 3 Enterprise

This guide walks through the basic steps of getting started with InfluxDB 3 Enterprise, including the following:

Data model

The InfluxDB 3 Enterprise server contains logical databases; databases contain tables; and tables are comprised of columns.

Compared to previous versions of InfluxDB, you can think of a database as an InfluxDB v2 bucket in v2 or an InfluxDB v1 db/retention_policy. A table is equivalent to an InfluxDB v1 and v2 measurement.

Columns in a table represent time, tags, and fields. Columns can be one of the following types:

• String dictionary (tag)
• int64 (field)
• float64 (field)
• uint64 (field)
• bool (field)
• string (field)
• time (time with nanosecond precision)

In InfluxDB 3 Enterprise, every table has a primary key–the ordered set of tags and the time–for its data. The primary key uniquely identifies each and determines the sort order for all Parquet files related to the table. When you create a table, either through an explicit call or by writing data into a table for the first time, it sets the primary key to the tags in the order they arrived. Although InfluxDB is still a schema-on-write database, the tag column definitions for a table are immutable.

Tags should hold unique identifying information like sensor_id, building_id, or trace_id. All other data should be stored as fields.

Tools to use

The following table compares tools that you can use to interact with InfluxDB 3 Enterprise. This tutorial covers many of the recommended tools.