I've been thinking about this question for a while. It's confusing at first blush because it's an append-only database and it has a WAL — and it feels like a WAL is already an append-only database, so what's even happening?

Looking back at the project now, I think the value comes from querying it, and especially from automatic aggregations.

    [rollups]
    enabled = true
    checkpoint_file = "rollup.checkpoints.log"
    default_grace = "5m"

    [[rollups.jobs]]
    id = "outside_temp_1h"
    source_metric = "temp.out_dry"
    interval = "1h"
    aggregates = ["min", "max", "sum", "avg", "count"]
    destination_db = "sensors_rollup_1h"
    destination_metric_prefix = "temp.out_dry"

This is a reasonable use case that can't immediately be resolved by just logging to a file. It creates an aggregation profile, so a sensor could log temperature every minute and the database will automatically average temperature by the hour. That's a straightforward and meaningful use case.

There's also some query support, but that may be closer to something you can sort of do if you just have a log file.

I think the aggregations are the most direct value proposition. OP/author: worth making this pitch "above the fold" in the README, imho.

Also, I've done a lot of analytics work, and a fun feature to add that I've built in the past is an approximate median. I might open a PR and remind myself how to build that. Cheers!