Re: Declarative partitioning - another take

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Yeah. That syntax has some big advantages, though. If we define that
> partition as START ('2014-01-01') INCLUSIVE END ('2014-12-31')
> INCLUSIVE, there's no way for the system to tell that the there's no
> gap between the that ending bound and the starting bound of the 2015
> partition, because the system has no domain-specific knowledge that
> there is no daylight between 2014-12-31 and 2015-01-01. So if we
> allow things to be specified that way, then people will use that
> syntax and then complain when it doesn't perform quite as well as
> START ('2014-01-01') END ('2015-01-01'). Maybe the difference isn't
> material and maybe we don't care; what do you think?
>

It was a fight I didn't expect to win, and even if we don't get
[x,x]-expressible partitions, at least we're not in the Oracle
context-waterfall, where the lower bound of your partition is determined by
the upper bound of the NEXT partition.

(I really don't want to get tied up adding a system for adding and
> subtracting one to and from arbitrary data types. Life is too short.
> If that requires that users cope with a bit of cognitive dissidence,
> well, it's not the first time something like that will have happened.
> I have some cognitive dissidence about the fact that creat(2) has no
> trailing "e" but truncate(2) does, and moreover the latter can be used
> to make a file longer rather than shorter. But, hey, that's what you
> get for choosing a career in computer science.)
>

That noise your heard was the sound of my dream dying.