Re: ALTER TABLE with TYPE serial does not work

Scott Marlowe schrieb:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 9:04 PM, Richard Broersma
> <richard(dot)broersma(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Andreas Wenk
>> <a(dot)wenk(at)netzmeister-st-pauli(dot)de> wrote:
>>
>>> Why does this not work:
>>>
>>> postgres=# ALTER TABLE tab1 ALTER COLUMN nr TYPE serial;
>>> ERROR: type "serial" does not exist
>> serial is really just "short-hand" for making an integer column use
>> default incrementing function. The following will fully explain what
>> it is so that you can alter the column:
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/datatype-numeric.html#DATATYPE-SERIAL
>
> Seeing as it works with adding a column, and I've seen instructions
> for creating a sequence, and then adding a dependency into the system
> tables, it's quite reasonable to expect that one day it will work with
> alter table alter column. But it's probably more complicated than
> just making it a serial type, there's probably some question of
> setting the sequence according to the max value in the table. I'd be
> surprised if it's not on the TODO list somewhere.

Thanks for this Scott. For me as a user it would be cool to have it ...
hopefully it's on a TODO list ;-).

On the other hand I don't think that this case will show up too often
because the decision to have a column in a table with a incrementing
sequence should be made while designing the database structure ...

Cheers

Andy

--
St.Pauli - Hamburg - Germany

Andreas Wenk