ztsdb is a fast, small and lightweight multi-user noSQL column-store database management system designed and optimized for the update, storage and handling of time-series data. Its query and manipulation language is based on the R programming language and allows complex selections of data inside a time-series or across multiple time-series. It is licensed under GPLv3.

This image contains the DBMS itself (ztsdb), a load test utility to append messages to a time-series in the DBMS (append) and the R programming language environment (R) with a library to access the DBMS (rztsdb). The latter allows to play around with the seamless connectivity that ztsdb allows between the DBMS and R.

Using the image

Running a container and starting ztsdb

docker run -it lsilvest/ztsdb ztsdb

You can use the quit command to terminate the ztsdb instance at any time:

q()

Running multiple instances

One can start multiple containers to test multiple instances or to simulate real-time append to time-series. To access an instance from outside the container, publish the listen port when running the container:

docker run -it -p 19300:19300 lsilvest/ztsdb ztsdb -p 19300

Make note of the IP address of the container; here is one way of getting it using the 'system' function:

system("ip addr show")

In this example, we will assume the container's IP address is 172.17.0.2.

Connecting from another ztsdb instance

Other ztsdb instances can be started in the same way as above. Once an instance has been started, a connection can be established as usual from the ztsdb command line:

docker run -it lsilvest/ztsdb ztsdb
c1 <- connection("172.17.0.2", 19300)

Append utility

The append utility generates append messages for a time-series at a specified frequency:

usage: append <ip> <port> <rate> <varname[,name1,name2,...]> <ncols> [max-msgs]

To use it, a time-series must first be created on the ztsdb server instance:

data  <-  matrix(0, 0, 3, dimnames=list(NULL, c("a","b","c")))
idx   <-  as.time(NULL)
a     <<- zts(idx, data)

The append can be started from another container like this (IP address=172.17.0.2, port=19300, rate=100000 msg/second, time-series' name=a, number of columns=3, continue sending indefinitely):

append 172.17.0.2 19300 100000 a 3

More information on the append utility can be found here.

Running R and connecting to the DBMS with the rztsdb library

R can be started from another container like this:

docker run -it lsilvest/ztsdb R

The relevant libraries can then be loaded like this:

library(rztsdb)
library(xts)

And a connection can then be established to the running instance:

con <- connection("172.17.0.2", 19300)

and used in its usual idiomatic way (seehttp://www.ztsdb.org for more info):

con ? 2*2                        # ask the remote instance to perform a multiplication
con ? matrix(1:10, 5, 2)         # ask the remote instance to create a matrix
con ? (a <<- matrix(1:10, 5, 2)  # create global variable `a` on the remote instance

Further info

• To get a quick overview of ztsdb with some specific examples, see ztsdb's homepage.

• For more details about starting and running a ztsdb instance, see the Running ztsdb section.

• For more in-depth information on ztsdb, see the Reference section.

• The ztsdb project is hosted on Gitlab

• The R interface package for ztsdb is also hosted on Gitlab

• The Docker image