Partitioned Data and Locking

I've found what to me is a surprising locking behavior when querying
partitioned data as described in section 5.10 of the User's Manual.

I have an empty parent table with a number of child tables containing data.
Each child has a CHECK condition on the relevant column. I am executing a
SELECT query against the parent table with a condition on the column in the
CHECK in the WHERE clause.

I have constraint_exclusion set to partition.

If I run EXPLAIN on the query, I get a result that shows that only the
child tables whose CHECKs are consistent with the WHERE clause are
searched. This is exactly what I expected.
However, when I run the query, AccessShareLocks are obtained by the
transaction for all child tables (and their indices).

Am I misunderstanding something? I seems that these locks shouldn't exist
if the query plan doesn't use most of the child tables.

If this is a bug, perhaps it could be fixed in a future release. I would be
beneficial to my application, as we most often are only writing to one
partition in any given day. If a query against older data is running, the
write transaction could still proceed.
-Ed

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Ed Behn / Staff Engineer / Airline and Network Services

Information Management Services

2551 Riva Road, Annapolis, MD 21401 USA

Phone: 410-266-4426 / Cell: 240-696-7443

ed(dot)behn(at)rockwellcollins(dot)com

www.rockwellcollins.com