Using InfluxDB with Django and Docker

Today I worked out an example of using InfluxDB from Django in Docker. Using Docker containers to run databases greatly reduces the amount of database configuration you need to worry about when you’re trying to work out a proof of concept.

InfluxDB is a great tool for storing timestamped data. Storing a timestamp and a set of measurements, one timestamp per row, in a Postgres database is possible, but inefficient. InfluxDB offers you a way to store a set of values, and a set of indexed meta-data tags per row.

For example, if you’re collecting hourly production data from multiple wells, you can store the rates as data values, and wells as indexed tags. Then looking up the production from a set of wells over some time period becomes very efficient due to indexing. Looking up wells by production rates, however, would be very inefficient, unless you stored rate data as a tag, and well names as values. Learn more here from the InfluxDB documentation.

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Exponential Random Variable Examples

I thought I’d show some examples of solving some common statistical word problems using Python. Today I’ll look at exponential random variables; this is a continuous random variable used to model the waiting time between independent events. Sometimes this is posed as the waiting time for the first event in a Poisson process.

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