PostgreSQL 10 High Performance - Third Edition

Dynamic creation

At that point, you might be thinking that there's no need for scheduling partition creation. Why not just create them dynamically as needed? Indeed, that is an option. But there are a few bits of not necessarily obvious complexity to be wary of.

When two sessions both notice a partition is missing at the same time, it's extremely easy to end up with a race condition in the code, where both try to create it, and transaction deadlock is a common side effect of problems in this area.

Sometimes bad data will come into your table. It might come from far in the past or the future relative to right now. You might not want to create a partition for all of those situations.

There are many pieces to get right for partitioning to work. ...