Timescale Cloud: Scale, Enterprise

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Timescale's tiered storage architecture includes a high-performance storage tier and a low-cost object storage tier:

You can query the data on the object storage tier, but you cannot modify it. Make sure that you are not tiering data that needs to be actively modified.

Timescale charges only for the storage that your data occupies in S3 in the Apache Parquet format, regardless of whether it was compressed in Timescale Cloud before tiering. There are no additional expenses, such as data transfer or compute.

By default, Timescale Cloud stores your service data in the standard high-performance storage. This storage tier comes in the standard and enhanced types. Enhanced storage is available under the Enterprise pricing plan only.

This storage type gives you up to 16 TB of storage and is available under all pricing plans. You change the IOPS value to better suit your needs in Timescale Console:

  1. In Timescale Console, select your service, then click Operations > Compute and storage

    By default, the type of high-performance storage is set to Standard.

  2. Select the IOPS value in the I/O boost dropdown

    Default standard storage in Timescale Cloud

  3. Click Apply

This storage type gives you up to 64 TB and 32,000 IOPS, and is available under the Enterprise pricing plan. To get enhanced storage:

  1. In Timescale Console, select your service, then click Operations > Compute and storage

  2. Select Enhanced in the Storage type dropdown

    Enhanced storage in Timescale Cloud

    Note

    The enhanced storage is currently not available in sa-east-1.

  3. Select the IOPS value in the I/O boost dropdown

    Select between 8,000, 16,000, 24,000, and 32,0000 IOPS. The value that you can apply depends on the number of CPUs in your service. Timescale Console notifies you if your selected IOPS requires increasing the number of CPUs. To increase IOPS to 64,000, click Contact us and we will be in touch to confirm the details.

    I/O boost in Timescale Cloud

  4. Click Apply

You change from enhanced storage to standard in the same way. If you are using over 16 TB of enhanced storage, changing back to standard is not available until you shrink your data to be under 16 TB. You can make changes to the storage type and I/O boost settings without any downtime. Wait at least 6 hours to attempt another change.

You enable the low-cost object storage tier in Timescale Console and then tier the data with policies or manually.

You enable tiered storage from the Overview tab in Timescale Console.

  1. In [Timescale Console][portal-ops-mode], select the service to modify

  2. In the Overview section, click Explorer

    Enable tiered storage

  3. In Explorer, click Storage configuration > Tiering storage, then click Enable tiered storage

    Once enabled, you can proceed to tier data manually or set up tiering policies. When tiered storage is enabled, you see the amount of data in the tiered object storage.

Note

Data tiering is available in Scale and Enterprise pricing plans only.

A tiering policy automatically moves any chunks that only contain data older than the move_after threshold to the object storage tier. This works similarly to a data retention policy, but chunks are moved rather than deleted.

A tiering policy schedules a job that runs periodically to asynchronously migrate eligible chunks to object storage. Chunks are considered tiered once they appear in the timescaledb_osm.tiered_chunks view.

You can add tiering policies to hypertables, including continuous aggregates. To manage tiering policies, connect to your service and run the queries below in the data mode, the SQL editor, or using psql.

To add a tiering policy, call add_tiering_policy:

SELECT add_tiering_policy(hypertable REGCLASS, move_after INTERVAL, if_not_exists BOOL = false);

For example, to tier chunks that are more than three days old in the example hypertable:

SELECT add_tiering_policy('example', INTERVAL '3 days');

By default, a tiering policy runs hourly on your database. To change this interval, call alter_job.

To remove an existing tiering policy, call remove_tiering_policy:

SELECT remove_tiering_policy(hypertable REGCLASS, if_exists BOOL = false);

For example, to remove the tiering policy from the example hypertable:

SELECT remove_tiering_policy('example');

If you remove a tiering policy, the remaining scheduled chunks are not tiered. However, chunks in tiered storage are not untiered. You untier chunks manually to local storage.

If tiering policies do not meet your current needs, you can tier and untier chunks manually. To do so, connect to your service and run the queries below in the data mode, the SQL editor, or using psql.

Tiering a chunk is an asynchronous process that schedules the chunk to be tiered. In the following example, you tier chunks older than three days in the example hypertable. You then list the tiered chunks.

  1. Select all chunks in example that are older than three days:

    SELECT show_chunks('example', older_than => INTERVAL '3 days');

    This returns a list of chunks. Take a note of the chunk names:

    _timescaledb_internal._hyper_1_1_chunk
    _timescaledb_internal._hyper_1_2_chunk
  2. Call tier_chunk to manually tier each chunk:

    SELECT tier_chunk('_timescaledb_internal._hyper_1_1_chunk');
  3. Repeat for all chunks you want to tier.

    Tiering a chunk schedules it for migration to the object storage tier, but the migration won't happen immediately. Chunks are tiered one at a time in order to minimize database resource consumption. A chunk is marked as migrated and deleted from the standard storage only after it has been durably stored in the object storage tier. You can continue to query a chunk during migration.

  4. To see which chunks are tiered into the object storage tier, use the tiered_chunks informational view:

    SELECT * FROM timescaledb_osm.tiered_chunks;

To see which chunks are scheduled for tiering either by policy or by a manual call, but have not yet been tiered, use this view:

SELECT * FROM timescaledb_osm.chunks_queued_for_tiering ;

To update data in a tiered chunk, move it back to the standard high-performance storage tier in Timescale Cloud. Untiering chunks is a synchronous process. Chunks are renamed when the data is untiered.

To untier a chunk, call the untier_chunk stored procedure.

  1. Check which chunks are currently tiered:

    SELECT * FROM timescaledb_osm.tiered_chunks ;

    Sample output:

    hypertable_schema | hypertable_name | chunk_name | range_start | range_end
    -------------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------------+------------------------
    public | sample | _hyper_1_1_chunk | 2023-02-16 00:00:00+00 | 2023-02-23 00:00:00+00
    (1 row)
  2. Call untier_chunk:

    CALL untier_chunk('_hyper_1_1_chunk');
  3. See the details of the chunk with timescaledb_information.chunks:

    SELECT * FROM timescaledb_information.chunks;

    Sample output:

    -[ RECORD 1 ]----------+-------------------------
    hypertable_schema | public
    hypertable_name | sample
    chunk_schema | _timescaledb_internal
    chunk_name | _hyper_1_4_chunk
    primary_dimension | ts
    primary_dimension_type | timestamp with time zone
    range_start | 2023-02-16 00:00:00+00
    range_end | 2020-03-23 00:00:00+00
    range_start_integer |
    range_end_integer |
    is_compressed | f
    chunk_tablespace |
    data_nodes |

If you no longer want to use tiered storage for a particular hypertable, drop the associated metadata by calling disable_tiering.

  1. To drop all tiering policies associated with a table, call remove_tiering_policy.

  2. Make sure that there is no tiered data associated with this hypertable:

    1. List the tiered chunks associated with this hypertable:

      select * from timescaledb_osm.tiered_chunks
    2. If you have any tiered chunks, either untier this data, or drop these chunks from tiered storage.

  3. Use disable_tiering to drop all tiering-related metadata for the hypertable:

    select disable_tiering('my_hypertable_name');
  4. Verify that tiering has been disabled by listing the hypertables that have tiering enabled:

    select * from timescaledb_osm.tiered_hypertables;

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