Partitioning best practices

Use the following best practices when defining custom partitioning strategies for your data stored in InfluxDB Clustered.

• Partition by tags that you commonly query for a specific value
• Only partition by tags that always have a value
• Avoid over-partitioning
• Limit the number of partition files
  • Estimate the total partition count

Partition by tags that you commonly query for a specific value

Custom partitioning primarily benefits single series queries that look for a specific tag value in the WHERE clause. For example, if you often query data related to a specific ID, partitioning by the tag that stores the ID helps the InfluxDB query engine to more quickly identify what partitions contain the relevant data.

Only partition by tags that always have a value

You should only partition by tags that always have a value. If points don’t have a value for the tag, InfluxDB can’t store them in the correct partitions and, at query time, must read all the partitions.

Avoid over-partitioning

As you plan your partitioning strategy, keep in mind that over-partitioning your data can hurt query performance. If partitions are too granular, queries may need to retrieve and read many partitions from the Object store.

• Balance the partition time interval with the actual amount of data written during each interval. If a single interval doesn’t contain a lot of data, partition by larger time intervals.
• Avoid partitioning by tags that you typically don’t use in your query workload.
• Avoid partitioning by distinct values of high-cardinality tags. Instead, use tag buckets to partition by these tags.

Limit the number of partition files

Avoid exceeding 10,000 total partitions. Limiting the total partition count can help manage system performance and costs.

While planning your strategy, take the following steps to limit your total partition count. We currently recommend planning to keep the total partition count below 10,000.

• Estimate the total partition count for the lifespan of your data
• Set a database retention period to prevent the number of partitions from growing unbounded
• Partition by month or year to avoid over-partitioning
• Don’t partition on high cardinality tags unless you also use tag buckets

Estimate the total partition count

Use the following formula to estimate the total partition count over the lifetime of the database (or retention period):

total_partition_count = (cardinality_of_partitioned_tag) * (data_lifespan / partition_duration)

• total_partition_count: The number of partition files in Object storage
• cardinality_of_partitioned_tag: The number of distinct values for a tag
• data_lifespan: The database retention period, if set, or the expected lifetime of the database
• partition_duration: The partition time interval, defined by the time part template