Upgrading from InfluxDB 3 Core to InfluxDB 3 Enterprise

By Suyash Joshi / Developer
Sep 02, 2025

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InfluxDB 3 Enterprise builds on Core with powerful features for production workloads, such as high availability, long-range query support, and advanced security. The good news? Upgrading is seamless, thanks to InfluxDB 3’s modern architecture and easy installation. Upgrade Core to Enterprise internal image

Benefits of upgrading

InfluxDB 3 Enterprise adds key capabilities for scaling and securing your time series infrastructure:

  • Query long-term data. Fast queries over large historical ranges with Enterprise’s compactor and indexing. For more information about historical query performance and overcoming InfluxDB 3 Core limitation, please read our CTO and Founder, Paul’s blog post.
  • Multi-node deployment. Scale out with read replicas, dedicated roles (ingest/query/compact), and failover.
  • Enhanced security. Fine-grained access controls, expiring tokens, and scoped privileges.
  • More capacity & tooling. Support for 100+ databases, 10k+ tables, and operational tools like compaction controls.
  • Read/write separation. Improve performance by isolating workloads.

How upgrading works

Install InfluxDB 3 Enterprise (via Docker or binary) and point it to the same object store used by Core; no data move is required. Since Enterprise is a superset of Core, it includes all Core features and the same compatible storage mechanism.

InfluxDB 3 separates compute (the running database process) from storage (your actual time series data), which means your data is stored independently in Parquet files via your local file system or, if you’re using remote object storage such as AWS S3, Azure Blob, or GCS.

Licensing: Please note that the license must be activated the first time. You will need to provide your email, and can get started with a free 30-day trial license. For at-home use, we offer a free license. If you’d like to purchase the full commercial license, please contact our sales team.

InfluxDB 3 Enterprise licenses:

  • Authorize usage of InfluxDB 3 Enterprise software for a single cluster.
  • Apply per cluster, with limits based primarily on the number of CPU cores.
  • Vary by license type, each offering different capabilities and restrictions.

Examples

  1. From Core to Enterprise (local file storage)
# Core
influxdb3 serve \
 --node-id node1 \
 --object-store file \
 --data-dir ~/.influxdb3

Stop InfluxDB 3 Core and Start InfluxDB 3 Enterprise as follows:

# Enterprise: add required cluster-id; license info, reuse same data-dir path
influxdb3 serve \
  --node-id node1 \
  --cluster-id cluster1 \
  --object-store file \
  --data-dir ~/.influxdb3
  --license-email [email protected]
  1. Remote object store (S3 shown; similar for Azure/Google)
# Core
influxdb3 serve \
  --node-id node2 \
  --object-store s3 \
--bucket my-influxdb-data \
--aws-access-key-id "KEY" \
--aws-secret-access-key "SECRET"

Stop InfluxDB 3 Core and Start InfluxDB 3 Enterprise as follows:

# Enterprise: add required cluster-id; license info, reuse same bucket/credentials
influxdb3 serve \
  --node-id node2 \
  --cluster-id cluster2 \
  --object-store s3 \
--bucket my-influxdb-data \
--aws-access-key-id "KEY" \
--aws-secret-access-key "SECRET"
--license-email [email protected]

Flexible deployments

Once you’re on Enterprise, you can scale out your nodes however you want.

  • Add additional nodes for ingest, query, or compaction depending on workload. For more information about multi-node setup, I suggest reading this blog post.
  • Use cloud storage for durability and scalability.
  • Deploy on Kubernetes, etc.

We hope this helps you understand how seamless the upgrade process is and all the benefits it brings. If you have any questions or need help, please reach out to our technical support or ask in our community community forum, Slack, or Discord. Our team will be happy to help.