Author: Anais Dotis-Georgiou

Telegraf is an open-source server agent designed for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Developed by InfluxData, it is part of the InfluxDB time series database platform. Known for its simplicity and ease of use, Telegraf offers a plug-and-play architecture with an array of input, output, and processor plugins. This flexibility allows Telegraf to seamlessly gather metrics from a diverse set of sources and write them into InfluxDB, serving as a vital component in monitoring and observability stacks.

One of Telegraf's strengths is its ability to integrate with a wide range of tools and services, enhancing the capabilities of InfluxDB. It supports various data formats and network protocols, enabling integrations with common systems like databases, message queues, and web services. Some notable integrations include popular databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, messaging systems like Kafka and MQTT, and cloud services from providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Additionally, Telegraf can collect data from various sources like sensors, IoT devices, and virtual systems and applications, making it a versatile tool for comprehensive monitoring solutions in diverse IT environments. This post covers the top types of Telegraf input plugins. 

Arrow Flight is a “new general-purpose client-server framework to simplify high-performance transport of large datasets over network interfaces.” Flight uses gRPC and IPC protocols as its foundation. The structure of Flight primarily focuses on the transmission of Arrow record batches. The protocols for transmitting methods and data use Protobuf outlines, providing compatibility with clients equipped to handle gRPC and Arrow individually, even if they do not support Flight directly. Moreover, additional enhancements fine-tune Flight to reduce performance penalties typically associated with Protobuf use, particularly those related to unnecessary memory duplication. 

You can also use Apache Arrow Flight SQL to query a database. Apache Arrow Flight SQL is “a new client-server protocol developed by the Apache Arrow community for interacting with SQL databases that makes use of the Arrow in-memory columnar format and the Flight RPC framework.” Essentially, the Flight SQL clients wrap the underlying Flight client. However, it also provides methods for defining streams of Arrow record batches and how to read them. FlightSQL is useful for writing database-agnostic code for different databases that support it. This more general approach is what this article covers. For example, if you are creating a UI or other user experience that might query different kinds of databases. 

Apache Arrow Flight SQL is “a new client-server protocol developed by the Apache Arrow community for interacting with SQL databases that makes use of the Arrow in-memory columnar format and the Flight RPC framework.” In this article, we’ll explore some of the advantages of Arrow Flight SQL, as well as how to read table metadata from an SQL database. Reading table metadata from an SQL database is crucial for several reasons. 

• First, it provides essential information about the table's structure, including column names, data types, and constraints.