Re: ALTER TABLE ... IF EXISTS feature?

Yes, thanks, those are reasonable goals.

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Daniel Farina wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > What are we adding a pl/pgsql dependency for? ?What is the benefit that
> > will warrant requiring people who disable plpgsql to enable it for
> > restores?
>
> There are two use cases I want to cover:
>
> 1) It should be possible to restore a dump made with --clean on an
> empty database without error, so it can be run in a transaction and
> the error code can be usefully monitored.
>
> 2) It should be possible a database be dumped and restored by a
> non-superuser, again, cleanly, as per 1.
>
> It was easy enough to change all the "DROP ..." statements to "DROP
> ... IF EXISTS", but the ALTER statements have no equivalent, and thus
> the only way for a dump created with --clean to run without error is
> to ensure that all table and domain constraints exist prior to
> restore.
>
> The obvious mechanisms that have come to mind in this thread are:
>
> * An IF EXISTS variant of ALTER, at least for TABLE and DOMAIN
> (although it may be strange to only support it on a couple of types)
>
> * Use of anonymous-DO code blocks (the prototype uses this, and this
> depends on plpgsql)
>
> * Bizarre things I can imagine doing that involve creative queries
> that, as a side effect, might drop objects that I have not mentioned
> because I thought they were too gross to be given serious
> consideration. But it might be plpgsql-less, which would be nice.
>
> Note that in the case where one wants to dump/restore as a
> non-superuser that one may not be in a position to conveniently do a
> (DROP|CREATE) DATABASE statement to work around the problem.
>
> --
> fdr

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +