We created a fun little tool that lets people explore the Otel data (Traces, Logs, Metrics) they send to axiom via the console in a vi-control inspired terminal ui. As a bonus we bumped the free plan to 3 datasets so everyone can take full advantage of the ax :D
It also serves as a nice showcase what kind of tools can be built with using nothing but the public APIs
28 billion data points in 50 gigabytes are not impressive for time series use. That's nearly 2 bytes per data point, many time series databases achieve 1 or less byte per data point.
It's not a point, it's an entire row of data with dozens of columns and JSON.
Even if the data took twice as much space, it's still worth it to have everything in a single data warehouse with easy joins and the full expressiveness of SQL.
Because labels or dimensions are not stored in as a value but as a row identifier in most implementations. That results in having to scan the entire row space and look at every row name and see if it matches the lookup.
Storing labels in a row based system (like SQL) allows querying by value, not column name which takes advantage of all optimizations and indexes making it a lot faster.
That said there is nothing forbidding someone to do both, DalmatinerDB, for example, uses a column-based format for metric values but a row-based format (PostgreSQL) for dimensions.