Add support for InfluxDB line protocol write API

[victorhooi]

InfluxDB recently introduced a new line protocol write API, for more efficient bulk entry of points:

influxdata/influxdb#2696

It would be awesome if support for this could be added in the Python client!

[trehn]

I'd also like to point out that UDP writes are currently broken since JSON over UDP was dropped in 0.9.0 already (in favor of this new line protocol).

Tempted to take a stab at this if @aviau isn't working on it already.

[aviau]

@trehn I'm not yet working on it. Your contribution would be much appreciated! Go ahead and I'll review :)

[trehn]

I have an initial implementation here: https://github.com/trehn/influxdb-python/commits/feature/line-protocol

• So far there is no reason to break backwards compatibility for the Python API.
• I introduced a dependency on python-dateutil in order to parse the string dates the Python API expects. This has the added advantage of allowing more date formats (dateutil will recognize a lot of different formats).
• datetime objects can now also be provided as timestamps (pretty much a side effect of parsing the date strings).
• If users want to avoid the performance overhead resulting from date string parsing and datetime handling, they can just pass in nanosecond integers.
• This is not implemented yet, but maybe we should use warnings.warn to warn people when they're specifying a database while using UDP. Selecting the database is now done on the server side for UDP and cannot be influenced by the client. Silently ignoring the database param might be confusing for users.
• The branch linked to above still has lots of test failures. If someone could take a look at these, it would be much appreciated, as I don't understand all of them (some might be obsolete now etc).

[ynezz]

@trehn Thanks for your effort, it seems like InfluxDB is still fast moving target as I had to do following small fixes on top of your changes to get it working again.

[aviau]

Please make sure that the line protocol is optional. Maybe you can open a PR?

[trehn]

Why should the line protocol be optional? From what I read in influxdata/influxdb#2696 it sounds like JSON is going away.

I'll merge the changes from @ynezz into my branch and try to get rid of the test failures.

[aviau]

it sounds like JSON is going away.

I didn't catch that at first. You are right then!

[tima]

As I understand it, JSON is going away once 1.0 is released, but JSON over TCP is remaining until then. I don't think keeping it around for a bit is such a bad idea since that is not a moving target. By keeping it around you have something functional to fallback on if the new line protocol implementation comes out of sync again.

[svetomir]

@aviau When will you add line protocol into your branch?

[aviau]

@svetomir I am waiting for a pull request from @trehn

[eoltean]

@aviau Is there a reason this issue is still open line write was merged into master? Is it still not working fully yet?

[aviau]

@adventures91 Forgot to close.

... Done!

[eoltean]

@aviau cool thanks! Any chance you could add this to a release?