The basic thing is this: One area where Oracle is ahead is in multi-tenant applications. They have an approach where you can build filters on data based on sp

The basic thing is this: One area where Oracle is ahead is in multi-tenant applications. They have an approach where you can build filters on data based on specific criteria. You can do this on PostgreSQL too but the way you have to do it before this either involves add-ons or actual partitions of data, or tweaks to prevent building functions altogether. Security barriers are important in catching up to Oracle in this regard and they allow us to build more integrated multi-tenant applications with greater access to the db by the tenants. NO INHERIT constraints open up a fairly large area of PostgreSQL for use or misuse, because you can now partition a primary key between parent and child declaratively. My own use will be to prevent inserts into the parent table directly. Table inheritance is a really neat feature if you use it in non-traditional ways. It is not particularly useful for its advertised use (set/subset stuff outside of partitioning). However what it allows you to do is to compose your tables out of smaller re-usable pieces each of which can have complex derivations of data attached. For example, if you want full text search on comments on a lot of your tables, you can create a consistent, centralized interface for this using table inheritance.