Re: Path question

Boszormenyi Zoltan <zb(at)cybertec(dot)at> writes:
> we are experimenting with modifying table partitioning
> so the ORDER BY clause can be pushed down to
> child nodes on the grounds that:

This is really premature, and anything you do along those lines now will
probably never get committed. The problem is that the transformation
you propose is wrong unless the planner can prove that the different
child tables contain nonoverlapping ranges of the sort key. Now you
might be intending to add logic to try to prove that from inspection of
constraints, but I don't believe that reverse-engineering such knowledge
on the fly is a sane approach: it will be hugely expensive and will add
that cost even in many situations where the optimization fails to apply.

The project direction is that we are going to add some explicit
representation of partitioned tables. After that, the planner can just
know immediately that a range-partitioned sort key is amenable to this
treatment, and at that point it'll make sense to work on it.

regards, tom lane