Flux data scripting language
This page documents an earlier version of InfluxDB OSS. InfluxDB OSS v2 is the latest stable version. See the equivalent InfluxDB v2 documentation: Get started with Flux and InfluxDB.
Flux is a functional data scripting language designed for querying, analyzing, and acting on time series data. It takes the power of InfluxQL and the functionality of TICKscript and combines them into a single, unified syntax.
Flux is production-ready and included with InfluxDB v1.8+.
Flux design principles
Flux is designed to be usable, readable, flexible, composable, testable, contributable, and shareable. Its syntax is largely inspired by 2018’s most popular scripting language, JavaScript, and takes a functional approach to data exploration and processing.
The following example illustrates pulling data from a bucket (similar to an InfluxQL database) for the last five minutes,
filtering that data by the cpu measurement and the cpu=cpu-total tag, windowing the data in 1 minute intervals,
and calculating the average of each window:
from(bucket:"telegraf/autogen")
|> range(start:-1h)
|> filter(fn:(r) =>
r._measurement == "cpu" and
r.cpu == "cpu-total"
)
|> aggregateWindow(every: 1m, fn: mean)
Query data with Flux
Guides that walk through both common and complex queries and use cases for Flux.
Enable Flux
Instructions for enabling Flux in your InfluxDB configuration.
Flux vs InfluxQL
Flux is an alternative to InfluxQL and other SQL-like query languages for querying and analyzing data. Flux uses functional language patterns making it incredibly powerful, flexible, and able to overcome many of the limitations of InfluxQL. This article outlines many of the tasks possible with Flux but not InfluxQL and provides information about Flux and InfluxQL parity.
Possible with Flux
- Joins
- Math across measurements
- Sort by tags
- Group by any column
- Window by calendar months and years
- Work with multiple data sources
- DatePart-like queries
- Pivot
- Histograms
- Covariance
- Cast booleans to integers
- String manipulation and data shaping
- Work with geo-temporal data
Joins
InfluxQL has never supported joins. They can be accomplished using TICKscript,
but even TICKscript’s join capabilities are limited.
Flux’s join() function allows you
to join data from any bucket, any measurement, and on any columns as long as
each data set includes the columns on which they are to be joined.
This opens the door for really powerful and useful operations.
Get started with Flux
Get started with Flux, InfluxData’s new functional data scripting language. This step-by-step guide will walk you through the basics and get you on your way.
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