Re: Documentation improvements for partitioning

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:00 PM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> You seem a little defensive about some reasonable review comments.

I am prone to that from time to time, and this may be an instance of it.

> While its true that the patch had syntax documentation, there was no
> user design documentation which explained how it worked to allow
> objective review. Had I been able to provide input without reading
> every email message, I would have done so earlier.

But I don't agree that it was impossible for you to provide input
earlier without reading every email message, nor do I agree that it is
unreasonable to expect to people who want to provide input to read the
relevant threads.

> The features I consider very important in the first release are
> 1. Declarative syntax (we have this!)
> 2. Tuple routing on INSERT/COPY (we have this!)
> 3. O(1) partition elimination for simple = queries
> 4. PRIMARY KEY defined using a) distinct set of UNIQUE constraints on
> each partition, b) partition key
>
> 2 and 3 are intimately connected because they would both use the same
> in-memory data for bsearch, so the code should be almost identical.
>
> 4 is important for Foreign Keys and Logical Replication
>
> As missing items, features 3 and 4 seem achievable in this release,
> potentially in restricted form.

Simon, this is ridiculous. We're 4 or 5 days away from the start of
the last CommitFest. We have time to fix bugs and improve
documentation and maybe tweak things here and there, but 3 and 4 are
significant development projects. There isn't time to do that stuff
right now and get it right. You don't get to show up more than two
months after the feature is committed and start complaining that it
doesn't include all the things you want. Which things ought to be
included in the initial patch was under active discussion about a year
ago this time.

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