f0e44751d7
Table partitioning is like table inheritance and reuses much of the existing infrastructure, but there are some important differences. The parent is called a partitioned table and is always empty; it may not have indexes or non-inherited constraints, since those make no sense for a relation with no data of its own. The children are called partitions and contain all of the actual data. Each partition has an implicit partitioning constraint. Multiple inheritance is not allowed, and partitioning and inheritance can't be mixed. Partitions can't have extra columns and may not allow nulls unless the parent does. Tuples inserted into the parent are automatically routed to the correct partition, so tuple-routing ON INSERT triggers are not needed. Tuple routing isn't yet supported for partitions which are foreign tables, and it doesn't handle updates that cross partition boundaries. Currently, tables can be range-partitioned or list-partitioned. List partitioning is limited to a single column, but range partitioning can involve multiple columns. A partitioning "column" can be an expression. Because table partitioning is less general than table inheritance, it is hoped that it will be easier to reason about properties of partitions, and therefore that this will serve as a better foundation for a variety of possible optimizations, including query planner optimizations. The tuple routing based which this patch does based on the implicit partitioning constraints is an example of this, but it seems likely that many other useful optimizations are also possible. Amit Langote, reviewed and tested by Robert Haas, Ashutosh Bapat, Amit Kapila, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, Corey Huinker, Jaime Casanova, Rushabh Lathia, Erik Rijkers, among others. Minor revisions by me.
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: http://www.postgresql.org/download See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at http://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.