Re: document the need to analyze partitioned tables

On 1/21/22 19:02, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> Thanks for looking at this
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 06:21:57PM +0100, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 10/8/21 14:58, Justin Pryzby wrote:
>>> Cleaned up and attached as a .patch.
>>>
>>> The patch implementing autoanalyze on partitioned tables should
>>> revert relevant portions of this patch.
>>
>> I went through this patch and I'd like to propose a couple changes, per the
>> 0002 patch:
>>
>> 1) I've reworded the changes in maintenance.sgml a bit. It sounded a bit
>> strange before, but I'm not a native speaker so maybe it's worse ...
>
> + autoanalyze on the parent table. If your queries require statistics on
> + parent relations for proper planning, it's necessary to periodically run
>
> You added two references to "relations", but everything else talks about
> "tables", which is all that analyze processes.
>

Good point, that should use "tables" too.

>> 2) Remove unnecessary whitespace changes in perform.sgml.
>
> Those were a note to myself and to any reviewer - should that be updated too ?
>

Ah, I see. I don't think that part needs updating - it talks about
having to analyze after a bulk load, and that applies to all tables
anyway. I don't think it needs to mention partitioned tables need an
analyze too.

>> 3) Simplify the analyze.sgml changes a bit - it was trying to cram too much
>> stuff into a single paragraph, so I split that.
>>
>> Does that seem OK, or did omit something important?
>
> + If the table being analyzed has one or more children,
>
> I think you're referring to both legacy inheritance and and partitioning. That
> should be more clear.
>

I think it applies to both types of partitioning - it's just that in the
declarative partitioning case the table is always empty so no stats with
inherit=false are built.

> + <command>ANALYZE</command> gathers two sets of statistics: once on the rows
> + of the parent table only, and a second one including rows of both the parent
> + table and all child relations. This second set of statistics is needed when
>
> I think should say ".. and all of its children".
>

OK

>> FWIW I think it's really confusing we have inheritance and partitioning, and
>> partitions and child tables. And sometimes we use partitioning in the
>> generic sense (i.e. including the inheritance approach), and sometimes only
>> the declarative variant. Same for partitions vs child tables. I can't even
>> imagine how confusing this has to be for people just learning this stuff.
>> They must be in permanent WTF?! state ...
>
> The docs were cleaned up some in 0c06534bd. At least the word "partitioned"
> should never be used for legacy inheritance - but "partitioning" is.
>

OK

--
Tomas Vondra
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