On 12 July 2017 at 10:46, Ashutosh Bapat
<ashutosh.bapat@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 12:54 AM, Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11 July 2017 at 13:29, Ashutosh Bapat
>>> The description in this paragraph seems to be attaching intuitive
>>> meaning of word "unbounded" to MAXVALUE and MINVALUE, which have
>>> different intuitive meanings of themselves. Not sure if that's how we
>>> should describe MAXVALUE/MINVALUE.
>>>
>> I'm not sure I understand your point. MINVALUE and MAXVALUE do mean
>> unbounded below and above respectively. This paragraph is just making
>> the point that that isn't the same as -/+ infinity.
>>
> What confuses me and probably users is something named min/max"value"
> is not a value but something lesser or greater than any other "value".
Ah OK, I see what you're saying.
It's worth noting though that, after a little looking around, I found
that Oracle, MySQL and DB2 all use MINVALUE/MAXVALUE for unbounded
range partitions (although in the case of Oracle and MySQL, they
currently only support specifying upper bounds, and only use MAXVALUE
at the moment).
So MINVALUE/MAXVALUE are likely to be familiar to at least some people
coming from other databases. Of course, for those other databases, the
surrounding syntax for creating partitioned tables is completely
different, but at least this makes the bounds themselves portable (our
supported set of bounds will be a superset of those supported by
Oracle and MySQL, and I think the same as those supported by DB2).
I also personally quite like those terms, because they're nice and
concise, and it's pretty obvious which is which.
Regards,
Dean