Re: UPDATE of partition key

On 27 March 2017 at 13:05, Amit Khandekar <amitdkhan(dot)pg(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Also, there are a few places in the documentation mentioning that such updates cause error,
>> which will need to be updated. Perhaps also add some explanatory notes
>> about the mechanism (delete+insert), trigger behavior, caveats, etc.
>> There were some points discussed upthread that could be mentioned in the
>> documentation.
>> Yeah, I agree. Documentation needs some important changes. I am still
>> working on them.

Attached patch v5 has above required doc changes added.

In the section 5.11 "Partitioning" => subsection 5 "Caveats", I have
removed the caveat of not being able to update partition key. And it
is now replaced by the caveat where an update/delete operations can
silently miss a row when there is a concurrent UPDATE of partition-key
happening.

UPDATE row movement behaviour is described in :
Part VI "Reference => SQL Commands => UPDATE

> On 4 March 2017 at 12:49, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> How about running the BR update triggers for the old partition and the
>> AR update triggers for the new partition? It seems weird to run BR
>> update triggers but not AR update triggers. Another option would be
>> to run BR and AR delete triggers and then BR and AR insert triggers,
>> emphasizing the choice to treat this update as a delete + insert, but
>> (as Amit Kh. pointed out to me when we were in a room together this
>> week) that precludes using the BEFORE trigger to modify the row.
>
> I checked the trigger behaviour in case of UPSERT. Here, when there is
> conflict found, ExecOnConflictUpdate() is called, and then the
> function returns immediately, which means AR INSERT trigger will not
> fire. And ExecOnConflictUpdate() calls ExecUpdate(), which means BR
> and AR UPDATE triggers will be fired. So in short, when an INSERT
> becomes an UPDATE, BR INSERT triggers do fire, but then the BR UPDATE
> and AR UPDATE also get fired. On the same lines, it makes sense in
> case of UPDATE=>DELETE+INSERT operation to fire a BR UPDATE trigger on
> the original table, and then the BR and AR DELETE/INSERT triggers on
> the respective tables.
>
> So the common policy can be :
> Fire the BR trigger. It can be INESRT/UPDATE/DELETE trigger depending
> upon what the statement is.
> If there is a change in the operation, according to what the operation
> is converted to (UPDATE->DELETE+INSERT or INSERT->UPDATE), all the
> respective triggers would be fired.

The current patch already has the behaviour as per above policy. So I
have included the description of this trigger related behaviour in the
"Overview of Trigger Behavior" section of the docs. This has been
derived from the way it is written for trigger behaviour for UPSERT in
the preceding section.