Compression Community

We highly recommend reading the blog post and tutorial about compression before trying to set it up for the first time.

Setting up compression on TimescaleDB requires users to first configure the hypertable for compression and then set up a policy for when to compress chunks.

Advanced usage of compression allows users to compress chunks manually, instead of automatically as they age.

Restrictions

The current version does not support altering or inserting data into compressed chunks. The data can be queried without any modifications, however if you need to backfill or update data in a compressed chunk you will need to decompress the chunk(s) first.

Starting with TimescaleDB 2.1, users have the ability to modify the schema of hypertables that have compressed chunks. Specifically, you can add columns to and rename existing columns of such compressed hypertables.

Associated commands

• ALTER TABLE
• add_compression_policy
• remove_compression_policy
• compress_chunk
• decompress_chunk