I guess what's confusing me is the first paragraph seems to indicate that all indexes must include the time column: https://docs.timescale.com/use-timescale/latest/schema-management/indexing/ Because I let Highbyte create my table (easier that way) and it doesn't know anything explicitly about Timescale, just Postgres, it would not let me convert the table to a hypertable until I dropped the constraint on the primary key (_id).