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!


New in InfluxDB 3.5

Key enhancements in InfluxDB 3.5 and the InfluxDB 3 Explorer 1.3.

See the Blog Post

InfluxDB 3.5 is now available for both Core and Enterprise, introducing custom plugin repository support, enhanced operational visibility with queryable CLI parameters and manual node management, stronger security controls, and general performance improvements.

InfluxDB 3 Explorer 1.3 brings powerful new capabilities including Dashboards (beta) for saving and organizing your favorite queries, and cache querying for instant access to Last Value and Distinct Value caches—making Explorer a more comprehensive workspace for time series monitoring and analysis.

For more information, check out:

InfluxDB Docker latest tag changing to InfluxDB 3 Core

On November 3, 2025, the latest tag for InfluxDB Docker images will point to InfluxDB 3 Core. To avoid unexpected upgrades, use specific version tags in your Docker deployments.

If using Docker to install and run InfluxDB, the latest tag will point to InfluxDB 3 Core. To avoid unexpected upgrades, use specific version tags in your Docker deployments. For example, if using Docker to run InfluxDB v2, replace the latest version tag with a specific version tag in your Docker pull command–for example:

docker pull influxdb:2

InfluxDB Cloud Serverless