**BACKGROUND**

I am working on a web application that has date pickers for searching. Those searches query a partitioned table. So far, so good.
However, based on the data I'm querying, we don't have a limit on the early date picker. I *could* impose an artificial, arbitrary value, but I'd rather have a quick query that fetches the earliest found partition table, possibly the latest as well, without knowing the date ranges of those partitions so we can get the earliest found date.

Partitions are created using a function that I believe is called in a cron job every month that creates a month+1 partition. They are named after timestamps, but only use year and month.

**PROBLEM**

Is there something that allows me do so this (pseudocode):

```
select min(date_column) from parted_table.earliest_partition;

```

For example, if a monthly table partition is created every new month starting from 2018, I would expect `earliest_partition` to be `table_2018_01`

```
select min(date_column) from table_2018_01

```

How would I get `table_2018_01` without knowing that 2018\_01 was the earliest created partition?

*Disclosure*: I'm working with someone else's code so I am not fully familiar with the system.

`postgres 9.4`

**tl;dr** I guess what I'm looking for is a query that searches table names and returns the earliest one. Should be doable through some built in pg\_ table?