Re: [netconf] restconf collections

[Kent Watsen <[e-mail]>]

Hi Hongwei,

> [HL] A user case for time series data (e.g., logs), customers want to get the data in between Time A and Time B. Do we use timestamp filter here?


Some events have only one timestamp.  The database likely has a primary key (e.g., "record-id”) and a separate “timestamp” field.  For all intents and purposes, the logs are persisted in time-order, so no additional sorting is needed.  The physical order is good enough.

However, other events may have distinct "time-generated" and "time-received” fields.  This is most notable for a “log-receiver” (or just “receiver", in rfc8639 parlance), as there may be a delay between when a log is generated by a publisher and when it is persisted by the receiver.   In this case, the user-expectation is undoubtedly to sort on “time-generated”. The “record-id” and “time-received” fields are physically in order (same as above), but “time-generated” could be all over the place, so a sort is needed.

FWIW, if the goal is to find logs generated in a window of time around a timestamp, a fast-filter can be used to whittle down the result-set to a (hopefully) manageable size before the slow-sort as follows:

	filter
		"time-generated >= timestamp-of-interest - some-window”
		and
		“time-received <= timestamp-of-interest + some-window"
	sort-by
		“time-generated"


K.