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](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/scaling/distributed_deployment/?s=user-defined-sharding) 1. Create a collection with user-defined sharding enabled 2. Create one shard key per time period (e.g., `2025-01`, `2025-02`, ..., `2025-06`) 3. Ingest data into the current period's shard key 4. When a new period starts, create a new shard key and redirect writes 5. 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 - Use `shard_key_selector` at query time to search only specific periods for efficiency - Shard keys can be placed on specific nodes for hot/cold tiering ## Collection Rotation (Alias Swap) Use when: you need per-period collection configuration (e.g., different qua...