Hypertables & Chunks

From a user’s perspective, TimescaleDB exposes what look like singular tables, called hypertables. A hypertable is the primarily point of interaction with your data, as it provides the standard table abstraction that you can query via standard SQL. Creating a hypertable in TimescaleDB takes two SQL commands: CREATE TABLE (with standard SQL syntax), followed by SELECT create_hypertable().

Virtually all user interactions with TimescaleDB are with hypertables. Inserting, updating, or deleting data, querying data via SELECTs, altering tables, adding new columns or indexes, JOINs with other tables or hypertables, and so forth can (and should) all be executed on the hypertable.

The true power of hypertables comes through an abstraction, or virtual view of many individual tables that actually store the data, called chunks.

All of the following commands allow you to create and manage many aspects of how your data is managed and queried in TimescaleDB.