It's not the same thing. 'SELECT MAX(temperature) > 10 FROM ...' gets you all the datapoints, with a value of true or false. Moving it to the WHERE clause only gets you the datapoints where temperature is > 10. Yes, you can fill with 0 after the GROUP BY, but if all datapoints are less than 10, you get nothing back from the database. That's confusing: were all datapoints less than 10, or was there nothing registered in the time window I'm querying? Impossible to tell the difference. Not to mention some user interfaces just bailing: no data. I need to show a chart with a timeline of this condition being true or false.

Plus my actual use case is even more complex, not only do I need something like MAX(temperature) > 10, I need (MAX(temperature)) > 10 && (MAX(temperature) - MAX(dewpoint)) > 4.5).

Yep you're right -- oversight on my part. To be clear, the "not sure why you'd run a query like that" was referring to doing it the InfluxQL way (which is not the same thing)...where your results would end up being the same controlling for time range.

Question for influx solution architect:

How do you delete points from a specific measurement in a specific retention policy?

not a solution architect but, just delete by a very specific timestamp. this is not possible if you are writing at coarse time precisions, so don't do that.

`delete from meas_name where time='2020-07-22T15:40:58.375506762Z'` - just tried that and it deleted one row.

You didn’t specify the retention policy...?

Blame the customer. Nice solution, architect!

Huh? I don't mean to come off as blaming anyone for anything. Trying to offer a work around for their problem with InfluxQL. They usually exist. They may not be good enough for some but offering them doesn't hurt. In this case, I certainly misunderstood the need though.