Re: Deprecating RULES

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On 10/11/2012 03:59 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
>> I'm also not real keen on the idea that someone could dump a 9.2
>> database and be unable to load it into 9.3 because of the DDL trigger,
>> especially if they might not encounter it until halfway through a
>> restore. That seems rather user-hostile to me.
>>
>> Also, how would you picture that working with pg_upgrade?
>>
>> RULEs are a major feature we've had for over a decade.
>
>
> That nobody in the right mind would use in production for YEARS. That said
> there is a very real problem here. For a very, very long time the
> recommended way (wrong way in fact) to do partitioning was based on rules.
> Now, those in the know immediately said, "WTF" but I bet you that a lot of
> people that we don't know about are using rules for partitioning.
>
> We definitely need a warning period that this is going away. That said, I
> don't know that we need a whole release cycle. If we start announcing now
> (or before the new year) that in 9.3 we will not have rules, that gives
> people 9-10 months to deal with the issue and that is assuming that we are
> dealing with early adopters, which we aren't because early adopters are not
> going to be using rules.

My experience suggests that only ample annoyance for at least one full
release cycle will provide a low-impact switch. This annoyance must
not be able to be turned off.

--
fdr