Optimizing Space Technology: Fast Data Access with InfluxDB and Apache Parquet

By Jessica Wachtel / Developer
Jul 10, 2024

To win the space race, aerospace and aviation companies must be fast. The end-to-end cycle of testing, visualizing test data, and making improvements demands swiftness, especially when a single launch yields billions of data points. It starts with real-time access to data. Real-time data analysis with nanosecond precision is crucial for monitoring environmental and habitat conditions when lives are at stake.

Speeding up the iteration pipeline is essential but not sufficient. Cost efficiency matters too. Air and space innovation is expensive, and strong data analysis practices can save money. Using data to inform decisions optimizes processes and ensures space technology is built right the first time, reducing both costs and waste.

Access to production system data is another challenge. It’s one thing to pull telemetry data into a database; it’s another to share access to that data. When equipment is in flight, incoming data is vital. Any deviation from expected values must reach engineers immediately for swift action. However, once the data ages, more teams and data scientists need to query and analyze it to make further improvements and continue the iteration process.

InfluxDB 3.0 and Apache Parquet facilitate quick data access across the organization, eliminating vendor lock-in limitations. These tools ensure reliable data access throughout the product pipeline, helping to speed up iterations, reduce costs, and provide fast, accurate data access. By choosing software from the open data ecosystem, you can protect your team and data while accelerating innovation.

Why InfluxDB and Apache Parquet?

Purpose-built time series database InfluxDB is the gateway to faster data accessibility and availability. InfluxDB handles the high velocity and volume of time series data in real-time and persists that data as Apache Parquet files. Parquet has become the standard in the open data ecosystem. This means after InfluxDB ingests the data, anyone with access to the database can easily download Parquet files from the production system and load the data into any of the many tools participating in the open data ecosystem or another instance of InfluxDB.

This eliminates the need for custom data formatting, giant CSV downloads and uploads, and promotes limited access to the production system. By participating in the open data ecosystem, Parquet allows users to extend the value and efficacy of time series data to other areas and applications not previously possible.

Parquet is an open source, columnar data file format designed for fast processing of complex data. Parquet supports different encoding and compression schemes on a per-column bases that allow for efficient data storage and retrieval in bulk. A number of open source projects have adopted the standard. Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Snowflake, Hive, Spark, Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Pandas are a few of the tools that adopted the Parquet standard. They’re available to all organizations working within the open data ecosystem. Many of these projects are built around object storage with Parquet files and an elastic query tier to process the files.

Getting data into InfluxDB from nearly any system or device is also smooth. The open source server based agent, Telegraf collects data from countless databases, systems, and sensors. Telegraf has over 300 plugins making InfluxDB a seamless addition to any tech stack.

In addition to moving Parquet files to other systems, working with data inside InfluxDB also provides great benefit to all stages of technical integration. Because InfluxDB itself is part of the open data ecosystem, it connects you to automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools that ramp up time-to-market. This includes dashboarding software Grafana, Tableau, and Power BI. Gain a competitive edge with improved insights by integrating with leading ML/AI tools such as Tensorflow and Petastorm.

Try InfluxDB today

Ready to get started with Parquet files? Sign up for a free cloud account today. If you’re unsure of the size of your workload and want to learn more about what you can do with InfluxDB, contact our sales team here.