Data lake and analytics · AutessaDB
Retention and archive tiers
AutessaDB data lake tables have retention policies and a long-term archive tier. Retention deletes rows older than a set number of days every day; the archive tier keeps recent days queryable in the table and moves older days to compressed Parquet in an archive, where they can be restored as a read-only table when you need them again.
-- the problem
Logs you must keep for years should not cost like data you query daily
Retention policies often mean "keep it for seven years, but nobody reads it after ninety days". Keeping everything hot is wasteful, and deleting it breaks the policy. Lifecycle settings handle both: recent data stays fast, older data stays kept.
What you get
- Retention: rows whose retention column (default _loaded_at) is older than retentionDays are deleted daily by a system job.
- Choose a partitioned date column for retention so whole partitions drop.
- Lifecycle: hotDays stay queryable; each older day is exported as compressed Parquet, verified and removed from the table.
- archiveDays sets total retention including the archive.
- Archive lock: NONE, GOVERNANCE or COMPLIANCE write-locks archived days until they expire.
- archive segments lists archived days with rows, size, storage class and status.
- archive restore makes a range of days (up to 366) queryable as <sqlName>__restored for 7 to 30 days, with the same access rules.
- delete-archived removes archived data without a lock, by day and optionally one column equality.
-- how it works
How does retention and archive tiers work in AutessaDB?
Choose a policy
Plain retention (delete after N days) or a lifecycle (hot days plus archive days).
Set it
Use set-retention or set-lifecycle; the response explains in plain language what will happen.
Restore when asked
Restore a date range and query the restored table, which drops itself when its time is up.
-- every option
Lifecycle options
| option | what it does |
|---|---|
| retentionDays | Days to keep rows; null or 0 keeps them forever. |
| retentionColumn | DATE or TIMESTAMP column age is measured on (default _loaded_at). |
| hotDays | Days kept queryable in the table; null turns the archive off. |
| archiveDays | Total retention in days, greater than hotDays. |
| archiveLock | NONE, GOVERNANCE or COMPLIANCE. |
| Restore | From and to days, kept 7 days by default and at most 30; deep-archive days can take up to 12 hours. |
-- example
Full reference in the AutessaDB CLI docs and the API reference.
-- permissions
Who can do what?
| access | can |
|---|---|
| ADMIN | Set retention and lifecycle, restore and delete archived data. |
-- faq
Questions about retention and archive tiers
Can I keep data lake data for years without keeping it all queryable?
Yes. Set hotDays for the queryable window and archiveDays for total retention; older days move to compressed Parquet in the archive.
Can archived data be queried again?
Yes. Restore a range of days and it becomes a read-only table named after the original with __restored, for 7 to 30 days.
Can archived days be locked against deletion?
Yes. A GOVERNANCE or COMPLIANCE archive lock write-locks archived days until they expire.
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