Re: What needs to be done for real Partitioning?

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> -- CREATE TABLE ... WITH PARTITION ON {expression}

I'd rather see the partition control stuff as ALTER TABLE commands,
not decoration on CREATE TABLE. See the WITH OIDS business we just went
through: adding nonstandard decoration to a standard command isn't good.

> -- 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. DELETE FROM
would be particularly bad. Furthermore, who wants to implement DROP
PARTITION as a DELETE FROM? ISTM the whole point of partitioning is to
be able to load and unload whole partitions quickly, and having to
DELETE all the rows in a partition isn't my idea of quick.

> -- setting of WITH PARTITION ON {expression} TABLESPACE should automatically
> create a new tablespace for each new partition and its indexes.

This is a bad idea. Where are you going to create these automatic
tablespaces? What will they be named? Won't this require superuser
privileges? And what's the point anyway?

> -- It should be possible to create new, empty partitions via a CREATE TABLE
> PARTITION OF {table} ON {value} expression.

Huh? ISTM this confuses establishment of a table's partition rule with
the act of pre-creating empty partitions for not-yet-used ranges of
partition keys. Or are you trying to suggest that a table could be
partitioned more than one way at a time? If so, how?

regards, tom lane