Re: Is a SERIAL column a "black box", or not?

On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 09:14:53AM -0700, Mark Dilger wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > 1. A serial column is a "black box" that you're not supposed to muck with
> > the innards of. This philosophy leads to the proposal that we disallow
> > modifying the column default expression of a serial column, and will
> > ultimately lead to thoughts like trying to hide the associated sequence
> > from direct access at all.
>
> It would be madness to prevent people from accessing the associated sequence.
> Assume the following schema:
>
> CREATE TABLE a (a_id SERIAL NOT NULL UNIQUE, ...);
> CREATE TABLE b (a_fk INTEGER REFERENCES a(a_id), ...);
>
> Now, if I need to insert into both tables a and b, how do I do it? After
> inserting into table a, if I can't access the sequence to get currval, I'll need
> to do a select against the table to find the row that I just inserted (which
> could be slow), and if the columns other than a_id do not uniquely identify a
> single row, then I can't do this at all.

Not madness. Just evidence of another problem, which is where the insert
that returns results comes in...

Cheers,
mark

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