On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 02:25 +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
> "Markus Schiltknecht" <markus@bluegap.ch> writes:
>
> > There are two very distinct ways to handle partitioning. For now, I'm calling
> > them named and unnamed partitioning.
> The naming is precisely the useful part in that it is how the DBA associates
> the properties with chunks of data.
Why does giving something a name help partition exclusion?
> Without naming the DBA would have to specify the same ranges every time he
> wants to change the properties. He might do a "SET read_only WHERE created_on
> < '2000-01-01'" one day then another "SET tablespace tsslow WHERE created_on <
> '2000-01-01'" and then later again do "SET offline WHERE created_on <
> '2000-01-01'"
>
> I have to admit I always found it kludgy to have objects named
> invoices_2000_JAN and invoices_2000_FEB and so on. It's kind of an meta
> denormalization. But so is specifying where clauses repeatedly.
The idea for using the WHERE clauses was to specifically avoid naming.
In most cases the table is divided into old read only and newer data. So
there is one split point that make it easy to use a simple WHERE clause.
If you guys really want names, we can have names, but I think I want to
see a case where the storage characteristics of the table are so complex
we can only make sense of it by naming particular chunks.
-- Simon Riggs 2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com