Azure Cosmos DB – TTL (Time to Live) – Reference Usecase

TTL capability within Azure Cosmos DB is a live saver, as it would take necessary steps to purge redudent data based on the configurations you may. 

Let us think in terms of an Industrial IoT scenario, devices can produce vast amounts of telemetry information, logs and user session information that is only useful until we operate on them and take action on them, to be specific up to finate period of time. Once that data becomes surplus, we need an application logic that purges these old records.

With the “Time to Live” or TTL, Microsoft Cosmos DB provides an ability to have your documents automatically purged from database storage after a certian period if time(which you configured)

• This TTL by default can be set on a document collection level and later can be overridden on a per document basis.
• Once the TTL is set, Cosmos DB service will automatically remove the documents when its lifetime is over.
• Inorder to track TTL, Cosmos DB uses an offset field to check when it was last modified.  This field is identifiable as “_ts”, which exists in every document you create.  Basically it is a UNIX epoch timestamp. This field is updated everytime when the document is modified. [Ref: Picture1]

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Enabling TTL on Cosmos DB Collection:

You can enable TTL on a Cosmos DB collection simply by using Azure Portal –> Cosmos DB collection setting for existing or during creation of  a new collection)

TTL value needs to be set in seconds – if you need 90 days => 60 sec * 60 min * 24 hour * 90 days = 7776000 seconds

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Below is a one of the reference architecture in which Cosmos DB – TTL would be essentially useful and viable to any Iot business case:

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Hope that was helpful to get some understanding. For more references visit:  Cosmos DB Documentation