Re: [HACKERS] SERIAL type isn't listed...?

> Shouldn't this produce something? Was talking with Dave Page today about
> the lack of a serial type in PgAdmin, and he mentioned that its not a
> listed type?

Right. That's because the SERIAL type is a parser kludge rather than a
full-fledged type. At the moment, a column defined as SERIAL becomes,
in the parser backend, a defined sequence (CREATE SEQUENCE ...) and an
INT4 column with a constraint of DEFAULT ... which refers to the
sequence just created.

There are downsides to this: the implicit SEQUENCE is not cleaned up
if the column is destroyed; explicit reference to SERIAL is lost
during dump/restore; the implicit stuff just leads to confusion, etc
etc etc.

Perhaps eventually it should become a type on its own, directly
accessing the same structures as Vadim's "sequence" code. Or perhaps
it could be done using the SPI interface.

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu
South Pasadena, California