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> That said, I'm still significantly confused why the hell you can only store numeric values. It just seems like a very arbitrary constraint.

"In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order."

A a numeric datapoint is by far the largest use case, timeseries databases optimize for that. Most allow you to have several labels ofcourse, i.e. you could store country border crossings as

{from: US,to:Canada} 1726377148, 2123 {from: US,to:Mexico} 1726377148, 34567



I don't believe there is any restriction in InfluxDB but I can't remember for sure. Of course in a relational DB you can absolutely store strings but create a separate table for it (same in ClickHouse). If you have a somewhat restricted set of strings, ClickHouse will laughably compress it down to almost nothing using the low cardinality approach.

However, strings aren't as common as usually you are a value of some sort.




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