The extension now works with PostgreSQL 10, while
retaining compatibility with version 9.6.
PostgreSQL 10 has numerous internal changes to functions and
APIs, which necessitates various glue code and compatibility
wrappers to seamlessly retain backwards compatiblity with older
versions.
Test output might also differ between versions. In particular,
the psql client generates version-specific output with `\d` and
EXPLAINs might differ due to new query optimizations. The test
suite has been modified as follows to handle these issues. First,
tests now use version-independent functions to query system
catalogs instead of using `\d`. Second, changes have been made to
the test suite to be able to verify some test outputs against
version-dependent reference files.
Users might want to implement their own partitioning function
or use the legacy one included with TimescaleDB. This change
adds support for setting the partitioning function in
create_hypertable() and add_dimension().
Hash partitioning previously relied on coercing (casting) values to
strings before calculating a hash value, including creating CHECK
constraints with casts. This approach is fairly suboptimal from a
performance perspective and might have issues related to different
character encodings depending on system.
Hash partitioning now instead uses a partitioning function that takes
an anyelement type that calls type-dependent hash functions internal
to PostgreSQL. This should provide more efficient hashing both by
avoiding unnecessary string conversions and by using more optimal
type-specific hash functions.
Support for the previous hash partitioning function is preserved for
backwards compatibility. Hypertables created with the previous
function will continue to use to old hashing strategy, while new
tables will default to the updated hash partitioning.
For safety, this change also blocks changing types on hash-partitioned
columns, since it seems hard to guarantee the same hash result between
different types.
