Retention Policies

A retention policy automatically drops old chunks from a hypertable or continuous aggregate on a scheduled basis. This keeps storage consumption bounded without requiring manual intervention and is the standard approach for managing time-series data lifecycle in TimescaleDB.

Each hypertable or continuous aggregate supports at most one retention policy.

See also: add_retention_policy

Drop Modes

Two mutually exclusive drop modes are available:

• dropAfter: Drops chunks whose data falls outside a time window relative to the current time. This is the standard mode.
• dropCreatedBefore: Drops chunks created before a specified interval ago, regardless of the data they contain.

Exactly one of dropAfter or dropCreatedBefore must be specified. Providing both or neither raises an exception.

Basic Example

using CmdScale.EntityFrameworkCore.TimescaleDB.Configuration.RetentionPolicy;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Metadata.Builders;

public class ApplicationLogConfiguration : IEntityTypeConfiguration<ApplicationLog>
{
    public void Configure(EntityTypeBuilder<ApplicationLog> builder)
    {
        builder.HasKey(x => new { x.Id, x.Time });

        builder.IsHypertable(x => x.Time)
               .WithChunkTimeInterval("1 day");

        // Drop chunks older than 30 days, running the job daily
        builder.WithRetentionPolicy(
            dropAfter: "30 days",
            scheduleInterval: "1 day");
    }
}

Using dropCreatedBefore

public class ApiRequestLogConfiguration : IEntityTypeConfiguration<ApiRequestLog>
{
    public void Configure(EntityTypeBuilder<ApiRequestLog> builder)
    {
        builder.HasKey(x => new { x.Id, x.Time });

        builder.IsHypertable(x => x.Time)
               .WithChunkTimeInterval("1 day");

        // Drop chunks created more than 30 days ago
        builder.WithRetentionPolicy(
            dropCreatedBefore: "30 days",
            scheduleInterval: "1 day");
    }
}

⚠️ Note: Customizing job scheduling parameters (scheduleInterval, maxRuntime, maxRetries, retryPeriod) on a dropCreatedBefore policy requires TimescaleDB 2.26.3 or later. Earlier versions contain a bug in alter_job that prevents these settings from being applied for drop_created_before policies. Policies using dropAfter are not affected and work on all supported TimescaleDB versions.

Complete Example

using CmdScale.EntityFrameworkCore.TimescaleDB.Configuration.RetentionPolicy;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Metadata.Builders;

public class ApplicationLogConfiguration : IEntityTypeConfiguration<ApplicationLog>
{
    public void Configure(EntityTypeBuilder<ApplicationLog> builder)
    {
        builder.HasKey(x => new { x.Id, x.Time });

        builder.IsHypertable(x => x.Time)
               .WithChunkTimeInterval("1 day");

        builder.WithRetentionPolicy(
            dropAfter: "30 days",
            initialStart: new DateTime(2025, 10, 1, 3, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc),
            scheduleInterval: "1 day",
            maxRuntime: "30 minutes",
            maxRetries: 3,
            retryPeriod: "5 minutes");
    }
}

public class ApplicationLog
{
    public Guid Id { get; set; }
    public DateTime Time { get; set; }
    public string ServiceName { get; set; } = string.Empty;
    public string Level { get; set; } = string.Empty;
    public string Message { get; set; } = string.Empty;
}

Supported Parameters

Parameter	Description	Type	Database Type	Default Value
dropAfter	The interval after which chunks are dropped. Mutually exclusive with dropCreatedBefore.	string?	INTERVAL	—
dropCreatedBefore	The interval before which chunks created are dropped. Based on chunk creation time. Only supports INTERVAL. Not available for integer-based time columns. Mutually exclusive with dropAfter.	string?	INTERVAL	—
initialStart	The first time the policy job is scheduled to run, as a UTC DateTime. If null, the first run is based on the scheduleInterval.	DateTime?	TIMESTAMPTZ	null
scheduleInterval	The interval at which the retention policy job runs.	string?	INTERVAL	'1 day'
maxRuntime	The maximum amount of time the job is allowed to run before being stopped. If null, there is no time limit.	string?	INTERVAL	'00:00:00'
maxRetries	The number of times the job is retried if it fails.	int?	INTEGER	-1
retryPeriod	The amount of time the scheduler waits between retries of a failed job.	string?	INTERVAL	Equal to the scheduleInterval by default.