Re: Cannot add an column of type serial or bigserial

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> You cannot add a serial column after table creation time in PostgreSQL.

But you can do the following from the query editor:

ALTER TABLE table ADD column INTEGER;
CREATE SEQUENCE table_column_seq;
ALTER TABLE table ALTER column SET DEFAULT nextval('"table_column_seq"'::text);

If you want the column to be NOT NULL as well, you will have to
populate that column for all the rows and then do:

ALTER TABLE table ALTER column SET NOT NULL;

Ian

> Chris
>
> David Sigeti wrote:
>
> > Dear Pgadmin Folks,
> >
> > I am using pgadminIII 1.0.2 with PostgreSQL 7.4 under W2K SP4 and Cygwin
> > (current as of 2 or 3 weeks ago). The server is running locally.
> >
> > If I attempt to add an column of type serial or bigserial to a table,
> > the operation fails with a message telling me that adding an column with
> > a default value is not implemented. What is really weird is that one
> > can, in fact, add a column with a default value, like an int4 with a
> > default value or 0. The problem does not arise if the serial (or
> > bigserial) column is created when the table is created (as a part of
> > CREATE TABLE).
> >
> > Yours,
> > David
> >
> > ---
> > Dr. David E. Sigeti
> > Phone: 505-667-9239
> > E-mail: sigeti(at)lanl(dot)gov
> > Surface mail: X-8, MS-F645, Los Alamos National Laboratory,
> > Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA
> >
> >
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> >
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