Since partitioning is just specialized inheritance, your zone_data
table doesn't actually have any rows in it, its just using the default
behavior of Postgres (from the manual:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/ddl-inherit.html):
"In PostgreSQL, a table can inherit from zero or more other tables, and
a query can reference either all rows of a table or all rows of a table
plus all of its descendant tables. The latter behavior is the default."
Use the "ONLY" keyword to only select rows in zone_data (of which there
are hopefully none):
SELECT * from ONLY zone_data;
HTH
-Mike