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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> Influx has higher temporal resolution, and an SQL interface (its the SQL interface I don't like)

SQL was too limited, that's why they did Flux, their new query language. It's weird and has a learning curve, but powerful.

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It honestly doesn't feel powerfull at all. I admit, I have started using Influx 2.0 during beta, but the experience has been horrible. I first tried to write all my logic in Influx and have now over few months moved everything back into Rust with just lines which go directly into graphs staying in influx. The language as it is is ok, it's very basic, but the runtime and the development environment is very unfinished. So many internal errors whatever you do, the responses are slow to be received because I guess so few people try to write anything more complicated in Flux, the debugging is very hard. You can't even print out single values, everything has to be displayed in graphs. They support using arrays and single values but you just get convoluted internal errors and compiler panics if you don't write correctly in a language without explicit typing.

> It's weird and has a learning curve, but powerful.

I don't doubt that, but teaching it to business analysts, product owners and the like is a real headache.

I'm sure I would grow to love it, but then it would require me to make dashboards for other people. Getting them to make them themselves is living the dream

SQL is not limited, InfluxQL is. And, flux is incredibly verbose and error prone (at least a year ago when we last looked at it). However, with the transformations in grafana, there's no reason with flux, in the majority of cases.

influxql is limited, yes, but much less verbose for time-based aggregation than the equivalent sql queries, which is why I like using it for adhoc visualization and inspectibility. (I don't like flux). to me it's great for a limited purpose. writing the equivalent sql queries would drive me up the wall.

For sure, we were evaluating timescaledb and influx, we quickly came to the conclusion that while a programmer could write SQL queries to do what influxql lets you do, they're very complicated compared to the builtin UI that even non tech people can understand.

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