Create hypertables

After creating a TimescaleDB database, you're ready to create your first hypertable. Creating a hypertable is a two-step process:

Create a PostgreSQL table as usual
Convert it to a TimescaleDB hypertable

You can create a distributed hypertable similarly.

Create a hypertable

To create a hypertable, you need to create a standard PostgreSQL table, and then convert it into a TimescaleDB hypertable.

Hypertables are intended for time-series data, so your table needs a column that holds time values. This can be a timestamp, date, or integer. For more information about creating hypertables, see create_hypertable().

Creating a hypertable

Create a standard PostgreSQL table:


CREATE TABLE conditions (
   time        TIMESTAMPTZ       NOT NULL,
   location    TEXT              NOT NULL,
   temperature DOUBLE PRECISION  NULL,
   humidity    DOUBLE PRECISION  NULL
);

Convert the table to a hypertable. Specify the name of the table you want to convert, and the column that holds its time values.
```
SELECT create_hypertable('conditions', 'time');
```

note

If your table already has data, you can migrate the data when creating the hypertable. Set the migrate_data argument to true when you call the create_hypertable function. This might take a long time if you have a lot of data. To learn other ways of migrating data, see the migration section.

Create hypertables

Create a hypertable

Creating a hypertable

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