> > The main points of interest: > > Saying that "ONLY" is a no-op when the observed behavior is that only the mentioned tables are affected seems wrong. I've removed those instances.
Maybe the original phrasing “has no effect” wasn’t clear for what I meant. What I was trying to express is that ONLY is intended to control whether an action propagates to child tables: with ONLY it should not propagate, and without ONLY it should.
For these particular sub-commands, however, the observed behavior is that they behave the same with or without ONLY. From a documentation perspective, stating that explicitly could help avoid user confusion.
Separately, I do have a plan to tighten this behavior in the future: for these commands, specifying ONLY would raise an error instead. If such a change is merged later, the documentation note could naturally be removed at that point.
So I’d like to keep the statement for now, but I’m very happy to adjust the wording if you have a clearer phrasing to suggest.
I've removed some I missed and tweaked others. I'm OK with leaving mention of ONLY in these sections but what happens is that ONLY becomes implicitly added to the command, which is what I'd rather communicate. The remaining wording is a bit redundant now but flows nicely.
Before I integrate your edits and prepare v3, I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on the points about ONLY and “newly created”.
As I continue to think about the "newly created" material the more I believe it is misplaced. That there is existing wording to that effect doesn't change my conclusion. I would add no additional text here even if you don't want to remove the existing mentions at this point. But I think the scope of this patch should be increased to fix this misplacement as well. Since moving content - refactoring - is what is happening here. In the attached 0003 I've removed the paragraphs that this patch now makes redundant within the alter table documentation. I wouldn't mind if they got moved to somewhere in Chapter 5.12 (Table Partitioning) and not just erased, along with ensuring that 5.12 includes how table creation definition inheritance works and removing those mentions from the alter table docs as well.
I'm not sure whether I'd fully remove all that content since some of it does pertain just to table inheritance. That feature seems like something best related to notes and not brought into the main flow like you are doing with partitioned tables.
