RE: [cacti-announce] Cacti 0.8.6j Released (fwd)

[<michael.dillon () bt com>]

> > But to start with, just solving the data storage problem is a good 
> > place to start. 

> How about something like:
> http://www.hdfgroup.org/whatishdf5.html

That certainly has a lot of support in the scientific community
in similar applications such as astronomy and high-energy
physics. However, if people don't understand the quirks of
dealing with large amounts of time-series data they will
probably look at HDF and consider it to be a poor out-of-date
cousin of the relational database. In fact, it is simply a
different approach to data storage which solves different
problems than relational databases do. A good network management
application would still use relational databases for some data
and only use HDF for the big time-series (SNMP poll data).

But HDF is still a general purpose format and it might be
possible to do better with a specialized time-series database
that has concepts such as deltas, missing values, or even
wavelets.

--Michael Dillon