Data retention

As an example, if you have a hypertable definition of where you collect raw data into chunks of one day:

However, deleting large swaths of data from tables can be costly and slow if done row-by-row using the standard command. Instead, TimescaleDB provides a function drop_chunks that quickly drop data at the granularity of chunks without incurring the same overhead.

This drops all chunks from the hypertable conditions that only include data older than this duration, and does not delete any individual rows of data in chunks.

It’s worth noting that continuous aggregates are also valid targets retention policies.