Re: What needs to be done for real Partitioning?

From: "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> > -- INSERT INTO should automatically create new partitions where
necessary
> > -- DELETE FROM should automatically drop empty partitions
>
> I am not sure I agree with either of those, and the reason is that they
> would turn low-lock operations into high-lock operations.

I second this. We're current using an inheritance based partitioning scheme
with automatic partition creation in the application code, and have seen at
least one case of deadlock due to partition creation.

Other phase II/III items might include:

- Modify the partitioning scheme of a table. In the above example, adding a
'200504' partition, and moving the '200502' orders into 'ARCHIVE'

- The ability to place a partition in a tablespace. In the example above,
it would be nice to put the 'ARCHIVE' partition would likely be placed on a
slower set of disks than the most recent month's partition.

- Global indexes (that is to say, an index spanning the the table rather
than an individual partition). This seems counterintuitive, but they've
dramatically increased performance on one of our Oracle systems and should
at least be worth considering.