Re: ALTER TABLE ... TO ... to change related names

Having just had to add serial columns to 3 columns, and found it
moderately painful, I have had these thoughts:
. We need "alter table foo add column bar serial" - wasn't someone
working on that?
. What about a rowid type? Wouldn't have to be in any order, just
unique. Could be an existing OID value, or something similar with no
wraparound? That would account for what I suspect is 90% of the cases
where serial fields are needed.

cheers

andrew

Tom Lane wrote:

>=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dennis_Bj=F6rklund?= <db(at)zigo(dot)dhs(dot)org> writes:
>
>
>>I don't understand why the serial columns sequence should be visible as
>>other sequences.
>>
>>
>
>Backwards compatibility, if nothing else. Are you prepared to break
>every existing dump file that has
> CREATE TABLE ser (f1 serial);
> SELECT pg_catalog.setval('ser_f1_seq', 1, false);
>
>
>
>
>>create table foo (x serial);
>>select nextval('foo.x');
>>
>>
>
>This conflicts with the existing provisions for accessing sequences
>using ordinary schema-qualified names ('schema.sequence').
>
>The work I would actually like to see getting done in this area is
>the existing TODO item about using Oracle-compatible syntax for nextval
>et al, namely that you can write
> sequence.nextval
>or
> schema.sequence.nextval
>rather than nextval('sequence') or nextval('schema.sequence'). The
>internal representation of such a thing could use the sequence OID to
>refer to the sequence, and would thereby be inherently rename-proof
>(not to mention visible to the dependency tracker, so's you couldn't
>accidentally drop a sequence that's still mentioned in some default
>expression). There is speculation in the archives about how we might
>implement this and even arrange to auto-migrate existing schemas during
>dump/reload.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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>