[stingraycharles]

Correct, almost all timeseries databases divide the data in shards / partitions / whatever-it’s-called, which are then split by column, which are then compressed as a single unit.

Some databases use a fixed block size (eg as you mention, “1 day”), which are simple and stateless to manage, while others dynamically “split” blocks into smaller blocks (frequently called “ranges”), or merge them back later. The latter is significantly more complex, but is a much better approach for varying workloads where you don’t know the right shard size in advance, or need to deal with the possibility of highly varying workloads, eg you have a lot of traffic on specific time of day / day of week/month/year.