Re: docs: clarify ALTER TABLE behavior on partitioned tables - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Fairly easy to review in its current form.

I've included my changes as a patch over your version 1.

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.

I tried to keep the "and 'is implicitly <actioned>" verbiage consistent throughout.  "Implicitly present" just seems off regardless of consistency.

"new partitions created in the future" - this is wordy given that "new" implies "created in the future".  Went with a simple "Newly created partitions".

I did mentally note at the end of this review session that quite a bit of text is spent saying how "create table" works in this "alter table" reference.  I didn't try to address it though.

You were using "can be applied independently" when in fact one "must" specify all desired tables to be acted upon in those sub-commands.  And, in that case in particular, if ONLY is accepted it would just do what the command already does.  I removed the mention of ONLY in these "must" cases.

The majority of additions you made and existing mentions of "individual partitions" do not include the clarification of "(leaf)".  I removed those that did - it seems like an unnecessary clarification.

If one has dropped a constraint from a partitioned table there would be no reason to expect that future newly created partitions might somehow have it.  I removed the wording that stated that this was the case.

It didn't seem necessary to point out that the obsolete backward compatible syntax for OIDS doesn't apply to partition-related tables.

Overall it looks good.  The mentions of "newly created ... do [not] inherit" is my only place of doubt.  I'd be inclined to remove them all, and if they are not covered elsewhere, introduce a section to cover them in the DDL chapter.

David J.