qdrant-sliding-time-window
Scaling with a Sliding Time Window
Use when only recent data needs fast search -- social media posts, news articles, support tickets, logs, job listings. Old data either becomes irrelevant or can tolerate slower access.
Three strategies: shard rotation (recommended), collection rotation (when per-period config differs), and filter-and-delete (simplest, for continuous cleanup).
Shard Rotation (Recommended)
Use when: data has natural time boundaries (daily, weekly, monthly). Preferred because queries span all time periods in one request without application-level fan-out. User-defined sharding
- Create a collection with user-defined sharding enabled
- Create one shard key per time period (e.g.,
2025-01,2025-02, ...,2025-06) - Ingest data into the current period's shard key
- When a new period starts, create a new shard key and redirect writes
- Delete the oldest shard key outside the retention window
- Deleting a shard key reclaims all resources instantly (no fragmentation, no optimizer overhead)
- Pre-create the next period's shard key before rotation to avoid write disruption
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