Documentation

Manage buckets

A bucket is a named location where time series data is stored. All buckets have a retention period, a duration of time that each data point persists. InfluxDB drops all points with timestamps older than the bucket’s retention period. A bucket belongs to an organization.

If coming from InfluxDB v1, the concepts of databases and retention policies have been combined into a single concept–bucket. Retention policies are no longer part of the InfluxDB data model. However, InfluxDB Cloud Serverless does support InfluxQL and the InfluxDB v1 API /write and /query endpoints, which require databases and retention policies. See how to map v1 databases and retention policies to buckets.

If coming from InfluxDB v2 or InfluxDB Cloud, buckets are functionally equivalent.

If coming from InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated or InfluxDB Clustered, database and bucket are synonymous.

Retention period

A bucket retention period is the maximum age of data stored in the bucket. The age of data is determined by the timestamp associated with each point. When a point’s timestamp is beyond the retention period (relative to now), the point is marked for deletion and is removed from the bucket the next time the retention enforcement service runs.

The minimum retention period for an InfluxDB bucket is 1 hour. The maximum retention period is infinite meaning data does not expire and will never be removed by the retention enforcement service.

You can update a bucket to change the retention period.

Table and column limits

In InfluxDB Cloud Serverless, table (measurement) and column are limited per bucket. Each measurement is represented by a table. Time, fields, and tags are each represented by a column.

Maximum number of tables: 500

Maximum number of columns: 200

The following articles provide information about managing buckets:


Was this page helpful?

Thank you for your feedback!


The future of Flux

Flux is going into maintenance mode. You can continue using it as you currently are without any changes to your code.

Read more

InfluxDB 3 Open Source Now in Public Alpha

InfluxDB 3 Open Source is now available for alpha testing, licensed under MIT or Apache 2 licensing.

We are releasing two products as part of the alpha.

InfluxDB 3 Core, is our new open source product. It is a recent-data engine for time series and event data. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise is a commercial version that builds on Core’s foundation, adding historical query capability, read replicas, high availability, scalability, and fine-grained security.

For more information on how to get started, check out:

InfluxDB Cloud Serverless