[pauldix]

The data is persisted as Parquet files on object storage (or locally attached disk) and is queryable from any tool that can read Parquet. It isn't evicted by the DB, the 72 hour limit is just what is visible by the running database process.

It's a constraint that we could relax over time, but for now we wanted to limit the scope so we can focus on the recent data. We're also considering a free tier of Enterprise for at-home use cases (i.e. non-commercial hobbyist).

As for EOL on previous versions, we don't have anything planned at the moment. We're partnered with AWS on their hosted versions of InfluxDB 2.x OSS so I expect that to continue for quite some time.

[AsianOtter]

Adding Merge Tree compaction, a la ClickHouse, should solve this, right?

[pauldix]

That's right, compaction is the way to solve for performance over longer time ranges. This is what we have in our commercial Enterprise product.