From: | Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> |
---|---|
To: | Çağıl Şeker <cagils(at)biznet(dot)com(dot)tr> |
Cc: | PostgreSQL-General-List "(E-mail)" <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org> |
Subject: | Re: ALTER TABLE & COLUMN |
Date: | 2002-11-29 20:22:06 |
Message-ID: | 1038601326.10098.7.camel@tokyo |
Views: | Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email |
Thread: | |
Lists: | pgsql-general |
On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 11:05, Çağıl Şeker wrote:
> I am surprised by the fact that altering tables and columns is so
> limited in PostgreSQL, this powerful DBMS! Changing column types and
> droping columns are missing important features I think.
7.3 (released yesterday) supports DROP COLUMN, as well as a bunch of
other enhancements to ALTER TABLE.
As for changing the type of a column, how would this be anything more
than syntactic sugar over renaming the existing column to a temp name,
adding a new column with the appropriate type & name, moving the data
from the old column to the new one, and dropping the old one?
Since a lot of data type changes are not obvious (how do you convert the
data from one type to another, in all cases?), I don't see a real
problem leaving this in the hands of the admin. The one exception might
be changing the length limit on a varchar(n) column, but that's such a
small case I'm not sure it's worth the bother (and can be done by
hacking the system catalogs anyway).
Cheers,
Neil
--
Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> || PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC
From | Date | Subject | |
---|---|---|---|
Next Message | Hannu Krosing | 2002-11-29 21:54:20 | Re: 7.4 Wishlist |
Previous Message | Scott Lamb | 2002-11-29 20:07:50 | Re: SQL Query |