Re: Boolean partitions syntax

On 2018/04/11 13:39, David Rowley wrote:
> On 11 April 2018 at 05:22, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> David Rowley <david.rowley@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>>> On 11 April 2018 at 03:34, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>>> Well, that just begs the question: why do these expressions need to
>>>> be immutable?  What we really want, I think, is to evaluate them
>>>> and reduce them to constants.  After that, it hardly matters whether
>>>> the original expression was volatile.  I see absolutely no moral
>>>> difference between "for values in (random())" and cases like
>>>> this, which works today:
>>
>>> I'd personally be pretty surprised if this worked.
>>
>> Well, my point is that we're *already* behaving that way in some cases,
>> simply because of the existence of macro-like inputs for some of these
>> datatypes.  I'm not sure that users are going to perceive a big difference
>> between 'now'::timestamptz and now(), for example.  If we take one but
>> not the other, I don't think anybody will see that as a feature.
> 
> To me, it seems a bit inconsistent to treat 'now'::timestamp and now()
> the same way.
> 
> I found this in the 7.4 release notes [1]:
> 
> "String literals specifying time-varying date/time values, such as
> 'now' or 'today' will no longer work as expected in column default
> expressions; they now cause the time of the table creation to be the
> default, not the time of the insertion. Functions such as now(),
> current_timestamp, or current_dateshould be used instead.
> 
> In previous releases, there was special code so that strings such as
> 'now' were interpreted at INSERT time and not at table creation time,
> but this work around didn't cover all cases. Release 7.4 now requires
> that defaults be defined properly using functions such as now() or
> current_timestamp. These will work in all situations."
> 
> So isn't 'now' being different from now() in DDL something users
> should be quite used to by now?
> 
> I've got to admit, I'm somewhat less concerned about evaluating
> volatile functions in this case because you don't seem that concerned,
> but if you happen to be wrong, then it's going to be a much harder
> thing to fix.  Really, is anyone going to complain if we don't
> evaluate these and reject them with an error instead? It seems like a
> safer option to me, also less work, and we're probably less likely to
> regret it.

As someone said upthread, we should just document that we *always*
evaluate the expression specified for a partition bound during create
table and not some other time.  That seems easier than figuring out what
to say in the error message; saying "cannot use immutable expression for
partition bound" is likely to confuse a user even more by introducing the
ambiguity about when partition bounds are evaluated.  Most users would
expect it to be create table time anyway.

> We also need to decide what of this we can backpatch to PG10 to fix
> [2].  Ideally what goes into PG10 and PG11 would be the same, so
> perhaps that's another reason to keep it more simple.

Backpatch all of it?  Newly introduced syntax and evaluation semantics
does not break inputs that PG 10 allows.  But I may be missing something.

Thanks,
Amit