A week of hourly detail is usually enough

Hourly detail is genuinely useful for about a week. You published something on Tuesday morning and you want to see what it did by lunchtime. You changed the newsletter send time and you want to know whether it helped.

After that, nobody looks. The questions people ask about last March are all daily or monthly, and the twenty-four rows per day sitting behind them are storage nobody is reading.

So we compact. Keep hours for the recent window, roll everything older into daily totals, and the tables stop growing in the dimension that grows fastest.

The only thing worth being careful about is saying so. A chart that silently shows flat hourly bars for a compacted day is inventing a shape. Better to say the detail is no longer held and show the daily figure honestly.