Re: Deprecating RULES - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 10/11/2012 08:20 PM, Daniel Farina wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:
>> On 10/11/2012 03:59 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>>
>>> I'm also not real keen on the idea that someone could dump a 9.2
>>> database and be unable to load it into 9.3 because of the DDL trigger,
>>> especially if they might not encounter it until halfway through a
>>> restore.  That seems rather user-hostile to me.
>>>
>>> Also, how would you picture that working with pg_upgrade?
>>>
>>> RULEs are a major feature we've had for over a decade.
>>
>> That nobody in the right mind would use in production for YEARS. That said
>> there is a very real problem here. For a very, very long time the
>> recommended way (wrong way in fact) to do partitioning was based on rules.
>> Now, those in the know immediately said, "WTF" but I bet you that a lot of
>> people that we don't know about are using rules for partitioning.
>>
>> We definitely need a warning period that this is going away. That said, I
>> don't know that we need a whole release cycle. If we start announcing now
>> (or before the new year) that in 9.3 we will not have rules, that gives
>> people 9-10 months to deal with the issue and that is assuming that we are
>> dealing with early adopters, which we aren't because early adopters are not
>> going to be using rules.
> My experience suggests that only ample annoyance for at least one full
> release cycle will provide a low-impact switch.  This annoyance must
> not be able to be turned off.
>


Spot on. All our experience is that just announcing things, especially 
in places other than release notes and similar, is ineffective as a way 
of communicating with our user base.

I'm with Tom and Josh and Daniel on this, and to be honest I'm somewhat 
surprised at the willingness of some people to spring surprises on 
users. I still come across uses of rules in the wild, and not just for 
partitioning either. Personally I think if we start now the earliest we 
should even consider removing the support is 9.4.

cheers

andrew