Partitioning data

There have been talks about introducing partitioning to PostgreSQL for years. However, big, important features take time to implement and this is especially true if you are aiming for a good, extensible, and future-proof implementation. In PostgreSQL 10.0, table partitioning has finally made it to the PostgreSQL core. Of course, the implementation is far from complete, and a lot of work has to be done in the future to add even more features. However, support for partitioning is important and will definitely be one of the most desirable things in PostgreSQL 10.0.

As of now, partitioning is able to:

• Automatically create proper child constraints
• Route changes made to the parent table to the child table

However, as stated earlier, there are still a couple of missing features that have not been addressed yet. Here are some of the more important things:

• Create child tables automatically in case data comes in, which is not covered by partitioning criteria yet
• No support for hash partitioning
• Move updated rows that no longer match the partition
• Handle partitions in parallel

The roadmap for PostgreSQL 11.0 already suggests that many of these things might be supported in the next release.