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ALTER VIEW

Name

ALTER VIEW -- change the definition of a view

Synopsis

ALTER VIEW name ALTER [ COLUMN ] column SET DEFAULT expression
ALTER VIEW name ALTER [ COLUMN ] column DROP DEFAULT
ALTER VIEW name OWNER TO new_owner
ALTER VIEW name RENAME TO new_name
ALTER VIEW name SET SCHEMA new_schema

Description

ALTER VIEW changes various auxiliary properties of a view. (If you want to modify the view's defining query, use CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW.)

You must own the view to use ALTER VIEW. To change a view's schema, you must also have CREATE privilege on the new schema. To alter the owner, you must also be a direct or indirect member of the new owning role, and that role must have CREATE privilege on the view's schema. (These restrictions enforce that altering the owner doesn't do anything you couldn't do by dropping and recreating the view. However, a superuser can alter ownership of any view anyway.)

Parameters

name: The name (optionally schema-qualified) of an existing view.
SET/DROP DEFAULT: These forms set or remove the default value for a column. A default value associated with a view column is inserted into INSERT statements on the view before the view's ON INSERT rule is applied, if the INSERT does not specify a value for the column.
new_owner: The user name of the new owner of the view.
new_name: The new name for the view.
new_schema: The new schema for the view.

Notes

For historical reasons, ALTER TABLE can be used with views too; but the only variants of ALTER TABLE that are allowed with views are equivalent to the ones shown above.

Examples

To rename the view foo to bar:

ALTER VIEW foo RENAME TO bar;

Compatibility

ALTER VIEW is a PostgreSQL extension of the SQL standard.

Comments

András Váczi

2012-04-04 18:03:21

'For historical reasons, ALTER TABLE can be used with views too; but the only variants of ALTER TABLE that are allowed with views are equivalent to the ones shown above.'

This is not quite true, as
ALTER TABLE viewname RENAME COLUMN something TO anything;
works, while
ALTER VIEW viewname RENAME COLUMN something TO anything;
does not.

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