Re: On partitioning

On 12/16/2014 07:35 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 9:01 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> Anyway, what I'm saying is that I personally regard the inability to
>> handle even moderately complex expressions a major failing of our
>> existing partitioning scheme (possibly its worst single failing), and I
>> would regard any new partitioning feature which didn't address that
>> issue as suspect.
>
> I understand, but I think you need to be careful not to stonewall all
> progress in the name of getting what you want. Getting the
> partitioning metadata into the system catalogs in a suitable format
> will be a huge step forward regardless of whether it solves this
> particular problem right away or not, because it will make it possible
> to solve this problem in a highly-efficient way, which is quite hard
> to do right now.

Sure. But there's a big difference between "we're going to take these
steps and that problem will be fixable eventually" and "we're going to
retain features of the current partitioning system which make that
problem impossible to fix." The drift of discussion on this thread
*sounded* like the latter, and I've been calling attention to the issue
in an effort to make sure that it's not.

Last week, I wrote a longish email listing out the common problems users
have with our current partitioning as a way of benchmarking the plan for
new partitioning. While some people responded to that post, absolutely
nobody discussed the list of issues I gave. Is that because there's
universal agreement that I got the major issues right? Seems doubtful.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com