InfluxDB Enterprise features

InfluxDB Enterprise has additional capabilities that enhance availability, scalability, and security, and provide eventual consistency.

Clustering

InfluxDB Enterprise runs on a network of independent servers, a cluster, to provide fault tolerance, availability, and horizontal scalability of the database.

While many InfluxDB Enterprise features are available when run with a single meta node and a single data node, this configuration does not take advantage of the clustering capability or ensure high availability.

Nodes can be added to an existing cluster to improve database performance for querying and writing data. Certain configurations (e.g., 3 meta and 2 data node) provide high-availability assurances while making certain tradeoffs in query performance when compared to a single node.

Further increasing the number of nodes can improve performance in both respects. For example, a cluster with 4 data nodes and a replication factor of 2 can support a higher volume of write traffic than a single node could. It can also support a higher query workload, as the data is replicated in two locations. Performance of the queries may be on par with a single node in cases where the query can be answered directly by the node which receives the query.

For more information on clustering, see Clustering in InfluxDB Enterprise.

Security

Enterprise authorization uses an expanded set of 16 user permissions and roles. (InfluxDB OSS only has READ and WRITE permissions.) Administrators can give users permission to read and write to databases, create and remove databases, rebalance a cluster, and manage particular resources.

Organizations can automate managing permissions with the InfluxDB Enterprise Meta API.

Fine-grained authorization for particular data is also available.

InfluxDB Enterprise can also use LDAP for managing authentication.

For FIPS compliance, InfluxDB Enterprise password hashing algorithms are configurable.

Eventual consistency

Hinted handoff

Hinted handoff (HH) is how InfluxDB Enterprise deals with data node outages while writes are happening. HH is essentially a durable disk based queue.

For more information, see “Hinted handoff”.

Anti-entropy

Anti-entropy is an optional service to eliminate edge cases related to cluster consistency.

For more information, see “Use Anti-Entropy service in InfluxDB Enterprise”.