Product Update – Custom Data Retention Periods for Buckets Made Easy

By Bharat Bhat / Product
Oct 14, 2022

We love to write and ship code to help developers bring their ideas and projects to life. That’s why we’re constantly working on improving our product to meet developers where they are, to ensure their happiness, and accelerate Time to Awesome.

This week, we are covering a product release that we think will save you time and effort when using InfluxDB with data retention requirements.

What is Data Retention and how does it work with InfluxDB buckets?

InfluxDB can handle hundreds of thousands of data points per second. Working with that much data over a long period of time can create storage concerns. A natural solution is to downsample the data: keep the high precision raw data for only a limited time, and store the lower precision, summarized data for much longer. And when creating a Data Recovery plan, you may want to consider using shorter retention times for the high precision data.

InfluxDB offers retention policies that automate the process of expiring old data. The InfluxDB Cloud data retention enforcement service checks for and removes data with timestamps beyond the defined retention period of the bucket the data is stored in. This service is designed to automatically delete “expired” data and optimize disk usage without any user intervention.

What’s changed?

As a PAYG or Annual Contract user, when creating a TSM bucket, you can now set a custom data retention period. Users are no longer limited to the retention period options displayed in the dropdown. Note: Free users can only retain data up to 30 days.

How do I use the custom data retention options?

Make sure to sign up for a free InfluxDB Cloud account. From there, just follow the steps below. For additional details on Retention Policy configuration, please take a look at our docs.

Of course, please reach out to us if you have any specific design or implementation questions. We are always here to help.