I love influx but damn do they like moving (too?) fast and quickly changing stuff. In a way, it's pretty cool since it means that they don't get stuck with bad decisions for backwards compatibility reasons, but it's a bit of a roller coaster for users.
Not sure what's the best solution though. Having a "stable" but fundamentally limited product (I guess influxdb v1) or breaking stuff in hopes of ending up with a way better technical foundation.
Been using both 1.x and 2.x for telemetry (oss & paid both). I am pretty excited with 3.x's interoperability. Archiving to standard data formats makes the data science team's job's easier, and with a more standard ANSI SQL query engine with jdbc support, and high cardinality tags, it will greatly speed up front end development and analysis use cases.
As well, I am one of those folks that happens to find the Flux query language powerful, but it's not easy enough for folks to just make that jump from SQL. Flux is much closer to Splunk's search language. It is good at what it does. FluxQL doesn't even have date parsing (which is really odd for a time series query language), but FlightSQL in 3.x seems to be more complete.
Was this a deal breaker for any company?
I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.
If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license. So $90 / year for everyone, but if you have US developers your all-in payroll is probably going to be over $200,000 per developer or roughly $2 million dollars. In that context $90 is practically nothing. A single lunch for the dev team could cost almost double that.
To me that is a bargain, you're getting an officially supported tool that "just works" on all operating systems.