Re: [HACKERS] Documentation improvements for partitioning

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 9:37 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> On 02/15/2017 06:10 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
>> > On 13 February 2017 at 05:21, Amit Langote
>> > <Langote_Amit_f8@lab.ntt.co.jp> wrote:
>>
>> > If I issue DROP TABLE elsewhere, it doesn't refuse to drop because it
>> > has indexes, sequences etc on it. So why should it just because it has
>> > partitions?
>>
>> Because partitions may have data.
>
> So would the table, were it not partitioned.

True.  I think the question here is: do we want to view the dependency
between a partitioned table and a partition of that table as
DEPENDENCY_NORMAL or as DEPENDENCY_AUTO?  With table inheritance, it's
always been "normal" and I'm not sure there's any good reason for
partitioning to make the opposite decision.  The new partitioning
implementation provides a user experience that is overall smoother
than doing the same thing with inheritance, but it's not as if you can
ignore the fact that your partitioned tables have sub-objects that are
also tables.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company