This guide shows you how to set up change retention in Sequin to store change messages (inserts, updates, and deletes) in your database. Then, you can stream those changes to a Sequin sink.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a table that stores change messages in a Postgres table in your database. Then, you can stream those changes to a Sequin sink and have the ability to backfill changes at any time.

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Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

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Steps

Open the Sequin web console and navigate to the Change Retention tab. Click “Create retention”.

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Configure source

1

Select the source table

Select the table you want to capture changes from.

2

Configure filters

Optionally, specify which operations to capture (e.g., insert, update, and/or delete). You can also add column filters to capture only certain changes.

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Configure destination

If you’ve created a change event table previously, you can select it from the list.

Otherwise, click Create new change event table to create a new table. This will open a modal that guides you through creating the table:

1

Choose a retention policy

Choose a retention policy for change messages.

If you’re not sure what to choose, we recommend selecting “None” and setting up a retention policy later.

2

Run the DDL commands

Copy the DDL commands from the modal and run them in your database.

3

Create the retention

Give your change retention a name, and click Create.

For more details on the options available, see the reference.

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Verify

Test that changes are being captured correctly:

  1. Connect to your database
  2. Make a test change to your source table:
-- Example: Insert a new row
insert into your_table (column1, column2) 
values ('test1', 'test2');
  1. Verify the change was captured into the destination table:
select action, record_pk, record, changes
from sequin_changes
order by id desc
limit 1;

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Next steps

Now that you’ve set up change retention, you can stream changes to a sink. With retention enabled, you can backfill changes to your sink at any time.

For more information about change retention, see the reference.