In the context of managing data retention in PostgreSQL databases, particularly with large amounts of time-partitioned data, issues arise from partition management causing repeated outages. The problem is often caused by interactions between scripts and queries that prevent locks required for creating new partitions or dropping old ones. TimescaleDB addresses this challenge by offering a lock avoidance approach, which solves the problems of failure to create partitions before they are needed blocking inserts, and dropping partitions when needed for regulatory or cost reasons not only failing but also blocking reading and writing to the relevant tables. This is achieved through maintaining its own chunk catalogs and locking only the partitions that will be removed, allowing reads and writes to other chunks without interfering with dropping or adding chunks.