The CHECK constraint in combination with inheritance is all it takes to build a table partitioning. In this case, we're using a bounding box as our CHECK constraint and simply inheriting the columns from the parent table. Now that we have this in place, queries against the parent table will check our CHECK constraints first before employing a query.
This also allows us to place any of our lesser-used contour tables on cheaper and slower storage, thus allowing for cost-effective optimizations of large datasets. This structure is also beneficial for rapidly changing data, as updates can be applied to an entire area; the entire table for that area can be efficiently dropped and repopulated without traversing across the dataset. ...
