Use a user-defined action to create a generic retention policy

Timescale natively supports adding a data retention policy to a hypertable. If you want to add a generic data retention policy to all hypertables, you can write a user-defined action.

Using a user-defined action to create a generic retention policy

Create a procedure that drops chunks from any hypertable if they are older than the drop_after parameter. To get all hypertables, the timescaledb_information.hypertables table is queried.


CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE generic_retention (job_id int, config jsonb)
LANGUAGE PLPGSQL
AS $$
DECLARE
  drop_after interval;
BEGIN
  SELECT jsonb_object_field_text (config, 'drop_after')::interval
    INTO STRICT drop_after;

  IF drop_after IS NULL THEN
    RAISE EXCEPTION 'Config must have drop_after';
  END IF;

  PERFORM drop_chunks(
    format('%I.%I', hypertable_schema, hypertable_name),
    older_than => drop_after
  ) FROM timescaledb_information.hypertables;
END
$$;

Register the job to run daily. In the config, set drop_after to 12 months to drop chunks containing data older than 12 months.
```
SELECT add_job('generic_retention','1d', config => '{"drop_after":"12 month"}');
```

Note

You can further refine this policy by adding filters to your procedure. For example, add a WHERE clause to the PERFORM query to only drop chunks from particular hypertables.

Use a user-defined action to create a generic retention policy

Using a user-defined action to create a generic retention policy

Note

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