---
title: About automation | Tiger Data Docs
description: Automate refresh, hypercore, retention, and custom tasks with scheduled jobs
---

Automation splits into built-in policies (refresh, columnstore, retention, reordering) and custom jobs you schedule yourself. Out of the box, TimescaleDB ships with policies such as:

- [Continuous aggregate policies](/docs/build/continuous-aggregates/refresh-policies/index.md) to automatically refresh continuous aggregates
- [Columnstore policies](/docs/reference/timescaledb/hypercore/add_columnstore_policy/index.md) to convert historical data to the columnstore
- [Retention policies](/docs/build/data-management/data-retention/create-a-retention-policy/index.md) to drop historical data
- [Reordering policies](/docs/reference/timescaledb/hypertables/add_reorder_policy/index.md) to reorder data within chunks

If these don’t cover your use case, you can create and schedule custom-defined jobs to run within your database. They help you automate periodic tasks that aren’t covered by the native policies.

In this section, you see how to:

- [Create and manage custom jobs](/docs/build/data-management/create-and-manage-jobs/index.md)
- [Create a custom retention job](/docs/build/data-management/example-generic-retention/index.md)
- [Create a custom job for automatic tablespace management](/docs/build/data-management/example-tiered-storage/index.md)
- [Create a custom job to downsample and compress chunks](/docs/build/data-management/example-downsample-and-compress/index.md)