This entirely removes any restriction on the type of partitioning
during DML planning and execution. Though there aren't actually any
technical limitations preventing DML commands against append- (or even
range-) partitioned tables, we had initially forbidden this, as any
future stage operation could cause shards to overlap, banning all
subsequent DML operations to partition values contained within more
than one shards. This ended up mostly restricting us, so we're now
removing that restriction.
When two data types have the same binary representation, PostgreSQL may
add an implicit coercion between them by wrapping a node in a relabel
type. This wrapper signals that the wrapped value is completely binary
compatible with the designated "final type" of the relabel node. As an
example, the varchar type is often relabeled to text, since functions
provided for use with text (comparisons, hashes, etc.) are completely
compatible with varchar as well.
The hash-partitioned codepath contains functions that verify queries
actually contain an equality constraint on the partition column, but
those functions expect such constraints to be comparison operations
between a Var and Const. The RelabelType wrapper node causes these
functions to always return false, which bypasses shard pruning.