Re: BUG #15212: Default values in partition tables don't work as expected and allow NOT NULL violation

On 2018/11/10 7:33, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
>> On 2018-Nov-09, Jürgen Strobel wrote:
>>> Regarding your example, what I expected is that *both* inserts would
>>> consistently result in a tuple of (1, 42) since p should route the
>>> insert to p1 and use p1's defaults. The current inconsistent behavior is
>>> the heart of the bug.
>
>> I think that would be sensible behavior, as long as the partition
>> doesn't override values for the partitioning column -- i.e. if the
>> default values don't re-route the tuple to another partition, I think we
>> should use the partition's default rather than the parent. This says we
>> should expand defaults after routing.
>
> I'd argue not, actually. I think there is plausible precedent in
> updatable views, where what we use is the defaults associated with the
> view, not the underlying table. Correspondingly, what ought to govern
> in a partitioned insert is the defaults associated with the table actually
> named in the insert command, never mind what its partitions might say.
> That is useful for many situations, and it avoids all the logical
> inconsistencies you get into if you find that the defaults associated
> with some partition would force re-routing elsewhere.
>
> In any case, you can't make this happen without basically blowing up
> default processing altogether. Defaults are currently expanded by the
> planner, and pretty early too. To make it work like the OP wishes,
> we'd have to insert them sometime late in the executor.

Considering multi-level partitioning, that'd mean the tuple being routed
would need to be filled with the defaults of every table on the way to a
leaf partition, including that of the leaf partition where the tuple
finally ends up. If we re-route upon the final leaf partition's defaults
leading to partition constraint violation, it's possible that someone
might end up setting up an infinite re-routing loop with that behavior.

create table p (a int) partition by list (a);
create table p1 partition of p (a default 2) for values in (1);
create table p2 partition of p (a default 1) for values in (2);

It won't be fun for the server to try to prevent that kind of thing.

IOW, it might be a good idea to call the ability to set partition-level
defaults a deprecated feature?

Thanks,
Amit