Hi guys, i have been using Home Assistant for a few months and this is my first post here.
I was asking to my self if it’s possible to query the previous state of an entity from a remote device.
In my case i’m trying to make a sort of Smart Calendar made of a Raspberry Pi and an e-ink display, and i wanted to show graphs regarding previous entity statuses on it.
The only solution i found so far is to use the Recorder and then query the external DB from the other device.
I’m trying to check what are the differences between InfluxDB and using the Recorder with MariaDB.
Unfortunately i’m trying to show graphs and values in a e-ink display, so i can’t show a webview on it.
I need to get values by myself and to draw the display via Python on a Raspberry Pi0W. This also answers why i can’t use Grafana.
From my limited knowledge, Influx DB is a time-series database whereas MariaDB is a relational database. Both of them will be a major improvement in terms of performance compared to the standard sqlite database used by Home Assistant.
If you want to use the history also in Home Assistant, you need to use MariaDB, InfluxDB doesn’t provide any data back to Home Assistant (you can of course query the DB from Home Assistant). I use MySQL for Home Assistant and feed some data into InfluxDB for which I want some long-time historical data, make statistics etc.