About automation

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 to automatically refresh continuous aggregates
• Columnstore policies to convert historical data to the columnstore
• Retention policies to drop historical data
• Reordering policies 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
• Create a custom retention job
• Create a custom job for automatic tablespace management
• Create a custom job to downsample and compress chunks