Re: Change the behaviour of the SERIAL "Type"

On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 14:31:34 +0200,
Dani Oderbolz <oderbolz(at)ecologic(dot)de> wrote:
>
> It was written for MySQL, which can take NULL and then assign an
> auto_increment.
> However, in PostgreSQL I am getting problems, because it would not let
> me insert NULL
> into a NOT NULL column (which is perfectly sensible from my point of view).
> But as the author has also left out the column list in the insert, its
> really tedious to change
> the code.

You can use the keyword DEFAULT instead of NULL and it will do what you
want.

> This way, there would be no possibility to circumvent the Value which
> comes from the Sequence.

You can use a unique constraint to enforce uniqueness.

> Is there a way to change SERIAL this way?

Well you can certainly write your own trigger to do this.