One advantage of partitioned tables is the ability to clean data up quickly. Suppose that we want to delete an entire year. If data is partitioned accordingly, a simple DROP TABLE clause can do the job:
test=# DROP TABLE t_data_2014;DROP TABLE
As you can see, dropping a child table is easy. But what about the parent table? There are depending objects and therefore PostgreSQL naturally errors out to make sure that nothing unexpected happens:
test=# DROP TABLE t_data;ERROR: cannot drop table t_data because other objects depend on it DETAIL: default for table t_data_2013 column id depends on sequence t_data_id_seq table t_data_2016 depends on table t_data table t_data_2015 depends on table t_data HINT: Use DROP ... CASCADE ...
