Re: Newbie Inheritance Question

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Edwin Grubbs wrote:

> Unless you have some kind of development environment that requires it, you
> should avoid using inheritance. Besides the fact that I recently asked on
> the list on how to get indexes to work when selecting from all the
> inherited tables at once and still have not received an answer,
> inheritance is just a bad way to structure your database since it makes it
> a huge pain to manage which entry should be in which table. One of the
> huge risks of using inheritance as a distinguishing attribute is that if
> you need to move rows between tables, you have to wrap the move in a
> transaction to make sure you don't delete something that didn't get moved
> probably or that you don't have the same row in two different tables.
>
> Instead of inheritance, you should have a table such as person_type, which
> describes the category that they are in which you were formally
> distinguishing between using inheritance. If you need to add additional
> columns just for one category, this can be done easily with an extra
> table, and you can always use views if you don't want to join tables
> manually a lot or if you need old code to remain compatible with the new
> layout. By having a column as your category attribute, you also benefit
> from being able to easily select from child-1 and child-2 without
> selecting rows from the parent table or child-3.
>
> -Edwin
>

If you want to stick to inheritance (which I don't see necessarily as a bad idea) the correct think would be to remove the entry from the parent and insert it in the corresponding child table.
So either you use inheritance and let Pg transparently take care of the "relationship" between parent-children or create the tables with id's so you can connect the corresponding entries with joins to implement the relationship yourself.

I guess things get hairy with when you have multiple inheritance, which doesn't seem to be your case.

cheers,
thalis

ps what was the question about "how to get indexes to work when selecting from all the inherited tables at once"?

> On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, David Wheeler wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Can anyone tell me now I might extend an existing record in a parent table
> > to have values in an inherited table? An example would be a table of all
> > people (person), and a table of users (usr) that inherits from person. Say
> > there's an existing record in person, and I want to use that same record
> > to make them a member of the usr table, as well. Is this possible, other
> > than by deleting the record from person and re-inserting it into usr?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > David
> >
> >
>
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