Re: BUG #15180: Alter table add column if not exists with unique constraint will add extra duplicate

"David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 11:47 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> A possible objection to this design is that right now, you can do
>>
>> alter table foo
>> add column if not exists f2 text,
>> add column if not exists f2 int;
>>
>> and it will skip the second ADD subcommand because by that point the
>> column exists. With this design, both test subcommands would find that
>> f2 doesn't exist so we'd try to do both ADD subcommands, and the second
>> one would fail. That doesn't particularly bother me, because this
>> command is silly.

> ​I'd argue its probably not that silly when you consider copy-paste errors
> - in which case actually failing instead of silently ignoring the second
> instance of the same name would be looked upon favorably by the user.

Yeah, good point.

I also noticed while looking at the code that AT_AddOids is a rather
klugy implementation of, effectively, ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS.
Perhaps it'd save code to fold it into this mechanism. Or maybe not,
since the OID column is pretty special-casey anyway.

regards, tom lane