InfluxDB's journey began with its focus on storing time series data, but as it evolved, it addressed issues like handling irregular events and high cardinality data sets. The latest iteration, powered by IOx, overcomes these limitations with a columnar structure, enabling efficient data compression and computation of time series on the fly from raw data. This update provides both storage and on-the-fly computation capabilities, as well as native support for SQL queries and edge federation, making it a more versatile time series database.