Time Series Databases: New Ways to Store and Access Data

Chapter 8. What’s Next?

The shape of the data landscape has changed, and it’s about to undergo an even bigger upheaval. New technologies have made it reasonable and cost effective to collect and analyze much larger amounts of data, including time series data. That change, in turn, has enticed people to greatly expand where, how, and how much data they want to collect. It isn’t just about having data at a much larger scale to do the things we used to do at higher frequency, such as tracking stock trades in fractions of seconds or measuring residential energy usage every few minutes instead of once a month. The combination of greatly increasing scale plus emerging technologies to collect and analyze data for valuable insights is creating the desire and ability to do new things.

This ability to try something new raises the question: what’s next? Before we take a look forward, let’s review the key ideas we have covered so far.

A New Frontier: TSDBs, Internet of Things, and More

The way we watch the world is new. Machine sensors “talk to” servers and machines talk to each other. Analysts collect data from social media for sentiment analysis to find trends and see if they correlate to the behavior of stock trading. Robots wander across the surface of the oceans, taking repeated measurements of a variety of parameters as they go. Manufacturers not only monitor manufacturing processes for fine-tuning of quality control, they also produce “smart parts” as components of high-tech equipment to ...