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.
If the name lookups come to different conclusions due to concurrent
activity, we might perform some parts of the DDL on a different table
than other parts. At least in the case of CREATE INDEX, this can be
used to cause the permissions checks to be performed against a
different table than the index creation, allowing for a privilege
escalation attack.
This changes the calling convention for DefineIndex, CreateTrigger,
transformIndexStmt, transformAlterTableStmt, CheckIndexCompatible
(in 9.2 and newer), and AlterTable (in 9.1 and older). In addition,
CheckRelationOwnership is removed in 9.2 and newer and the calling
convention is changed in older branches. A field has also been added
to the Constraint node (FkConstraint in 8.4). Third-party code calling
these functions or using the Constraint node will require updating.
Report by Andres Freund. Patch by Robert Haas and Andres Freund,
reviewed by Tom Lane.
Security: CVE-2014-0062
(which now deals only in optimizable statements), and put that code
into a new file parser/parse_utilcmd.c. This helps clarify and enforce
the design rule that utility statements shouldn't be processed during
the regular parse analysis phase; all interpretation of their meaning
should happen after they are given to ProcessUtility to execute.
(We need this because we don't retain any locks for a utility statement
that's in a plan cache, nor have any way to detect that it's stale.)
We are also able to simplify the API for parse_analyze() and related
routines, because they will now always return exactly one Query structure.
In passing, fix bug #3403 concerning trying to add a serial column to
an existing temp table (this is largely Heikki's work, but we needed
all that restructuring to make it safe).
