Command recursion for GPDB7 partition tables

[Huansong Fu]

For certain commands, there are differences in their recursion behavior between GPDB6, 7 and PG12. We have investigated them and the details can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qURtns5VZUheZzd0nWvaU69-ID_PVdOh6t6zltZ0Jno/edit .

The most important take-away is that, we have certain commands in GPDB6 that recurse from the partition root table to the child tables by default, while the upstream does not recurse and doesn’t have any means to make it recurse. For GPDB7, we have decided to keep it consistent with GPDB6, but will support the ‘ONLY’ keyword for those commands that when specified, the command won’t recurse to the child tables. We have already supported this keyword for some commands such as ALTER TABLE SET ACCESS METHOD and SET <reloptions>.

As another follow-up to this, we will investigate how this would affect pg_dump and pg_restore due to the behavior divergence between GPDB7 and PG12, and make changes to the same if necessary. In addition, since there is also some difference between GPDB6 and 7 (e.g. REINDEX which we recurse in GPDB7 now), we will also be looking into gp_backup and gp_restore for the same reason.

Let me know if you have any question/suggestion. 

Thanks,

Huansong

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