Seems it is optional: Historical data, own server - default feature, or DB needed?
As I use a M.2 SATA drive I have plenty of space, and not worried about read/writes wearing out an SD card.
A negative is that it increases the size of my IOTstack Dropbox daily backup.
I’ve only been injecting some small data points so far, would be interesting to see how large the files get after a while. I’ll start logging a temperature sensor for now.