Introduction to TDengine

TDengine is a time-series database designed to help traditional industries overcome the challenges of Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT. It enables real-time ingestion, storage, analysis, and distribution of petabytes of data per day, generated by billions of sensors and data collectors. By making big data accessible and affordable, TDengine helps everyone — from independent developers and startups to industry stalwarts and multinationals — unlock the true value of their data.

TDengine Offerings

• TDengine OSS is an open-source, cloud-native time-series database. Its source code is licensed under the AGPL and publicly available on GitHub. TDengine OSS serves as the code base for our paid offerings and provides the same core functionality. Unlike some open-core products, TDengine OSS is a full-featured solution that includes the necessary components for production use, including clustering.
• TDengine Enterprise is a high-performance big data platform designed for Industry 4.0 and the Industrial IoT. Built on the open-source TDengine OSS, it delivers an enterprise-grade feature set tailored to the needs of traditional industries.
• TDengine Cloud delivers all features of TDengine Enterprise as a fully managed service that can run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

What Makes TDengine Different

TDengine differentiates itself from typical time-series databases with the following four core competencies:

1. High Performance at Any Scale: With its distributed scalable architecture that grows together with your business, TDengine can store and process massive datasets up to 10.6x faster than other TSDBs — all while providing the split-second latency that your real-time visualization and reporting apps demand.
2. Efficient Data Storage: With its unique design and data model, TDengine provides the most cost-effective solution for storing your operations data, including tiered storage, S3, and 10:1 data compression, ensuring that you can get valuable business insights from your data without breaking the bank.
3. Data Consolidation Across Sites: With built-in connectors for a wide variety of industrial sources — MQTT, Kafka, OPC, PI System, and more — TDengine delivers zero-code data ingestion and extract, transform, and load (ETL) in a centralized platform that acts as a single source of truth for your business.
4. Comprehensive Solution for Industrial Data: With out-of-the-box data subscription, caching, and stream processing, TDengine is more than just a time-series database — it includes all key components needed for industrial data storage and processing built into a single product and accessible through familiar SQL statements.

What TDengine Delivers

With its innovative "one table per device" design, unique supertable concept, and highly optimized storage engine, TDengine is purpose-built to meet the unique needs of ingesting, querying, and storing massive time-series datasets. In its role at the core of the industrial data architecture, it provides the following functionality:

1. Data Ingestion: You can write data into TDengine with standard SQL or in schemaless mode over the InfluxDB Line Protocol, OpenTSDN Telnet Protocol, and OpenTSDB JSON Protocol. TDengine also seamlessly integrates with data collectors like Telegraf and Prometheus.
2. Data Querying: In addition to standard SQL query syntax, TDengine includes time-series extensions such as downsampling and windowing and functions such as cumulative sum and time-weighted average to better meet the needs of time-series data processing. TDengine also supports user-defined functions (UDF), which can be written in C or Python.
3. Read Caching: TDengine uses a time-driven first-in, first-out (FIFO) cache management strategy, keeping the most recent data in the cache. This makes it easy and fast to access the real-time status of any metric without the need for other caching tools like Redis, simplifying system architecture and reducing operational costs.
4. Stream Processing: TDengine's built-in stream processing engine provides the capability to process data streams in real-time as they are written, supporting not only continuous queries but also event-driven stream processing. This lightweight but optimized solution can return results in milliseconds even during high-throughput data ingestion.
5. Data Subscription: TDengine includes data subscription out of the box, eliminating the need to deploy other complex products to provide this critical feature. You can define topics in SQL, subscribing to a query, supertable, or database, and use a Kafka-like API to consume these topics in your applications.
6. Visualization and BI: Through its REST API and standard JDBC and ODBC interfaces, TDengine seamlessly integrates with leading platforms like Grafana, Power BI, and Seeq.
7. Clustering: TDengine supports clustered deployment so that you can add nodes to scale your system and increase processing capacity. At the same time, it provides high availability through multi-replica technology and supports Kubernetes deployment. It also offers various operational tools to facilitate system administrators in managing and maintaining robust cluster operations.
8. Data Migration: TDengine provides various convenient data import and export functions, including script file import/export, data file import/export, and the taosdump tool.
9. Client Libraries: TDengine offers client libraries for a variety of different programming languages, including Java, Python, and C/C++, so that you can build custom applications in your favorite language. Sample code that you can copy and paste into your apps is also provided to make the development process even easier.
10. O&M Tools: You can use the interactive command-line interface (CLI) for managing clusters, checking system status, and performing ad hoc queries. The stress-testing tool taosBenchmark is a quick way to generate sample data and test the performance of TDengine. And TDengine's GUI component taosExplorer simplifies the operations and management process.
11. Data Security: With TDengine Enterprise, you can implement fine-grained access controls with rich user and permissions management features. IP whitelisting helps you control which accounts can access your cluster from which servers, and audit logs record sensitive operations. In TDengine Enterprise, you can also configure encryption in transit on the server level and encryption at rest on the database level, which is transparent to operations and has minimal impact on performance.
12. Zero-Code Data Connectors: TDengine Enterprise includes zero-code connectors for industrial data protocols like MQTT and OPC, traditional data historians like AVEVA PI System and Wonderware Historian, relational databases like Oracle Database and SQL Server, and other time-series databases like InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. With these connectors, you can synchronize or migrate diverse time-series datasets to TDengine in the GUI without touching a line of code.

How TDengine Benefits You

With its high performance, standard SQL support, and component integration, TDengine can reduce your total cost of data operations:

1. Industry-leading performance: TDengine significantly outperforms other time-series databases with up to 16 times faster ingestion and over 100 times higher query performance than InfluxDB or TimescaleDB while requiring fewer storage resources. Because TDengine ingests data faster, stores data more efficiently, and responds to queries more quickly, it uses fewer CPU and storage resources and adds less to your bills.
2. Easy to use with no learning costs: TDengine is easier to use than other time-series database solutions and does not require specialized training. This is because TDengine supports standard SQL, is easy to integrate with third-party tools, and comes with client libraries for various programming languages, including sample code.
3. Simplified, fully integrated solution: By including stream processing, caching, and data subscription as built-in components at no extra cost, TDengine eliminates the need to deploy third-party products just to process time-series data. Its components are simple, easy to use, and purpose-built to process time-series data.

TDengine Ecosystem

With its open ecosystem, TDengine allows you the freedom to construct the data stack that is best for your business. Its support for standard SQL, zero-code connectors for a wide range of industrial protocols and data solutions, and seamless integration with visualization, analytics, and business intelligence (BI) applications make it easy to fit TDengine into your infrastructure.

Figure 1. TDengine ecosystem

As shown in the figure, TDengine acts as the central source of truth in an industrial data ecosystem, ingesting data from a variety of sources and sharing that data with business applications and stakeholders.

Application Scenarios

TDengine is the only time-series database purpose-built for industrial scenarios and is fully capable of storing and processing the massive, high-frequency datasets generated by a range of industries, especially the following:

• Renewable energy
• Manufacturing
• Connected cars

TDengine can also form the core component of a data stack to enable the following industrial applications:

• Predictive maintenance
• Vibration analysis
• Condition monitoring