Explains how schedules and gives examples.

You can schedule periodic snapshots and backups. For snapshots, ThoughtSpot comes configured with a strongly recommended periodic snapshot policy. For backups, there is no such policy but you may want to create one or several of your own configurations. This section helps to understand existing schedules and how to configure new schedules.

Configuration format

ThoughtSpot uses a protocol buffer configuration file to hold snapshot and backup policies. There are slight differences between the configuration of snapshots and backups. You can read more about these later. However, the file format defines a schedule structure which is the same for both snapshots and backups. The following example shows the schedule format:


schedule {
    period {
        number: integer
        unit: MINUTE | HOUR | DAY
        }
    retention_policy {
        bucket {
            time {
                number: integer
                unit: MINUTE | HOUR | DAY
             }
             capacity: integer
        }
    }
    offset_minutes_from_sunday_midnight: integer
}

The schedule has the following components:

period Specifies the frequency in the chosen unit. You can specify the unit as MINUTE, HOUR, or DAY.
retention_policy Specifies retention intervals. Retention is on a first-in-first-out (FIFO) basis. So, the oldest result is always discarded. You can specify the unit as MINUTE, HOUR, or DAY. You can specify multiple retention buckets and they can have different retention policies.
offset_minutes_from_sunday_midnight Determines the minute within the hour you’d like execution to start. Setting this to zero is equivalent to midnight.

Work through an example schedule

In this section, you work through an example schedule. This is a working example that is the actual default snapshot schedule set on every ThoughtSpot instance.


schedule {
    period {
        number: 1
        unit: HOUR
    }
    retention_policy {
     bucket {
         time {
            number: 1
            unit: HOUR
         }
         capacity: 3
     }
     bucket {
        time {
            number: 4
            unit: HOUR
        }
        capacity: 2
        }
    }
    offset_minutes_from_sunday_midnight: 0
}

Under this policy, a snapshot is taken every hour starting at midnight. You can see that by combining the period of 1 hour with the midnight offset of 0.


    schedule {
        period {
            number: 1
            unit: HOUR
        }
        ...
        }
        offset_minutes_from_sunday_midnight: 0
    }

Using this frequency, a total of 24 snapshots are taken in a day.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 … 24

If you were to specify a number of 2, the frequency changes. The first execution would start at midnight but subsequent executions would happen every 2 hours as shown here:

  2   4   6   8   10   12   14 … 24

You use the retention_policy to control how many snapshots are kept. In this example, the first bucket retains a snapshot every three hours.


retention_policy {
    bucket {
        time {
            number: 1
            unit: HOUR
        }
        capacity: 3
    }     
    ...
 }

At the beginning of the fourth hour, the system discards the snapshot from the first hour. This is in accordance with FIFO behavior. Therefore, this retention bucket contains snapshots from hours 2, 3, and 4.

1D 2R 3R 4R 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 … 24

The second bucket retains the snapshot taken at four hour intervals.


 retention_policy {
    ...
    bucket {
        time {
            number: 4
            unit: HOUR
        }
        capacity: 2
    }      
}

It retains two of these four-hour-interval snapshots at any one time. By hour 9 during the day, you have the snapshots from hour 4 and hour 8 in this second bucket.

1 2 3 4R 5 6 7 8R 9 10 11 12 13 14 … 24

Consider what you will have in the first bucket in hour 9? The first bucket has the snapshots from hour 9, 8, and 7.

At the end of the day, in the first bucket, you can have 22, 23, and 24th snapshot. While in the second bucket, you will have the 20th hour and the 24th hour snapshots.

1 … 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20R 21 22R 23R 24R

What if you changed the period frequency to every 2 hours? What would you have retained in your buckets at hour 24?

1 … 12   14   16   18R   20R   22R   24R

As you can see, when defining a policy it can be helpful to graphically represent the frequency you configure. Then, determine which time blocks are important to retain before determining your retention bucket.