I'm not really sure what is your point. I was not suggesting partitioning alone is a load-balancing solution, but that partitioning in combination with other fe

I'm not really sure what is your point. I was not suggesting partitioning alone is a load-balancing solution, but that partitioning in combination with other features is a powerful scalability feature. Assuming there is a (1) way to keep the partitions withing some size limit automatically, and (2) the partitioning scheme is such that the queries can leverage the partitioning scheme (eliminate most partitions, join tables partitioned in the same way). We don't have (1) yet - at least not in core PostgreSQL, but this part should be doable in an extension until it gets into the core. We do have (2) to a large extent, although I'm sure there are gaps and room for improvement. And when combined with ability to place partitions to other hots, that will be another step. No one is claiming partitioning alone magically solves scalability, but IMHO it's an important building block in doing that (for a large class of applications).