Can you delete data from influxdb?

Question

It appears that you can do this in influxdb 0.9. For instance, here's a query that just succeeded for me:

DROP SERIES FROM temperature WHERE machine='zagbar'

(Per generous comment by @MuratCorlu, I'm reposting my earlier comment as an answer...)

With influx, you can only delete by time

For example, the following are invalid:

#Wrong
DELETE FROM foo WHERE time < '2014-06-30' and duration > 1000 #Can't delete if where clause has non time entity

This is how I was able to delete the data

DELETE FROM foo WHERE time > '2014-06-30' and time < '2014-06-30 15:16:01'

Update: this worked on influx 8. Supposedly it doesn't work on influx 9

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned InfluxDB retention policies for automatic data removal. You can set a default retention policy and also set them on a per-database level.

From the docs:

CREATE RETENTION POLICY <retention_policy_name> ON <database_name> DURATION <duration> REPLICATION <n> [DEFAULT]

Because InfluxDB is a bit painful about deletes, we use a schema that has a boolean field called "ForUse", which looks like this when posting via the line protocol (v0.9):

your_measurement,your_tag=foo ForUse=TRUE,value=123.5 1262304000000000000

You can overwrite the same measurement, tag key, and time with whatever field keys you send, so we do "deletes" by setting "ForUse" to false, and letting retention policy keep the database size under control.

Since the overwrite happens seamlessly, you can retroactively add the schema too. Noice.

This is for InfluxDB shell version: 1.8.2

Delete works without time field too. As you can see from the series of screen shots:

1. I create a DB and and add start using it.

2. Add some rows in it.Verify if they are added.

3. Delete all with tag 'Dev1' and verify the same.

Note: The tag name has to be in single quotes only. Not double.