Re: RangeType internal use

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> It's going to be complicated and probably buggy, and I think it is heading
>> in the wrong direction altogether.  If you want to partition in some
>> arbitrary complicated fashion that the system can't reason about very
>> effectively, we *already have that*.  IMO the entire point of building
>> a new partitioning infrastructure is to build something simple, reliable,
>> and a whole lot faster than what you can get from inheritance
>> relationships.  And "faster" is going to come mainly from making the
>> partitioning rules as simple as possible, not as complex as possible.

> Yeah, but people expect to be able to partition on ranges that are not
> all of equal width.  I think any proposal that we shouldn't support
> that is the kiss of death for a feature like this - it will be so
> restricted as to eliminate 75% of the use cases.

Well, that's debatable IMO (especially your claim that variable-size
partitions would be needed by a majority of users).  But in any case,
partitioning behavior that is emergent from a bunch of independent pieces
of information scattered among N tables seems absolutely untenable from
where I sit.  Whatever we support, the behavior needs to be described by
*one* chunk of information --- a sorted list of bin bounding values,
perhaps.
        regards, tom lane