Postgresql – Unable to alter partition table to set logged

Your problem is that when you add a new column to the_person, its child, the_person_two will have this field appended at the end of columns list (4th position), so after has_default column. See:

db=> \d temp_person
  Column   |       Type        |                            Modifiers                            
-----------+-------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------
 person_id | integer           | not null default nextval('temp_person_person_id_seq'::regclass)
 name      | character varying | 
 foo       | text              | 

db=> \d temp_person_two 
   Column    |         Type         |                            Modifiers                            
-------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------
 person_id   | integer              | not null default nextval('temp_person_person_id_seq'::regclass)
 name        | character varying    | 
 has_default | character varying(4) | not null default 'en'::character varying
 foo         | text                 | 

So, when you execute this:

INSERT INTO temp_person_two VALUES ( NEW.* );

PostgreSQL will actually understand that you want to insert on the first three columns of temp_person_two (as NEW.* will expand to three values), generating something similar to this:

INSERT INTO temp_person_two(person_id,name,has_default)
VALUES ( NEW.person_id, NEW.name, NEW.foo );

So, temp_person_two.has_default will get the value of NEW.foo, which is NULL in your case.

The solution is to simply expand the column names:

INSERT INTO temp_person_two(person_id,name,foo)
VALUES ( NEW.person_id, NEW.name, NEW.foo );

or, you could also use this:

INSERT INTO temp_person_two(person_id,name,foo)
VALUES ( NEW.* );

But this is weak, as any changes on column positions may break your statements, so I'd recommend the first one.

EDIT:

So the conclusion and the lesson learned here is:

Always explicitly type the names of the columns and the values when issuing an INSERT command, in fact, when issuing any SQL command at all... =D

This will save you a lot of time solving problems like that in future.

There are many open ends in your question, but partitioning by customer could to be the way to go - especially if:

• you expect many customers,
• each of them could have tons of data ("tons" means much more than RAM cache size),
• most of their datasets will be mutually exclusive (each customer sees different subset of data).

RULEs or triggers are a performance overhead, and can be avoided.

Consider something along these lines:

BEGIN;

CREATE USER tenant1;
CREATE USER tenant2;

CREATE SCHEMA app;
CREATE SCHEMA tenant1;
CREATE SCHEMA tenant2;

CREATE TABLE app.objects_nonphysical(id int);
CREATE TABLE app.objects_physical(id int);
CREATE TABLE app.objects_mapping(id int);    
CREATE TABLE tenant1.objects_nonphysical() INHERITS(app.objects_nonphysical);
CREATE TABLE tenant1.objects_physical() INHERITS(app.objects_physical);
CREATE TABLE tenant1.objects_mapping() INHERITS(app.objects_mapping);
CREATE TABLE tenant2.objects_nonphysical() INHERITS(app.objects_nonphysical);
CREATE TABLE tenant2.objects_physical() INHERITS(app.objects_physical);
CREATE TABLE tenant2.objects_mapping() INHERITS(app.objects_mapping);

GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA tenant1 TO tenant1;
GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA tenant2 TO tenant2;
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA tenant1 TO tenant1;
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA tenant2 TO tenant2;

/* TEST: simulate login as customer */
SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION tenant2;
/* No schema needed - default search_path works */
SELECT count(*) FROM objects_nonphysical; 

ROLLBACK;

You do not need any triggers / rules to maintain it.

There are open ends here - that's just a draft... Some issues:

• PK, FK and indexes are not "inherited".
• even if you create them, the PK is not enforced on master table
• you can overcome this by using same sequence for all tenants
• obviously, application must be adjusted for this model