Re: Is there any different for foreign key to be serial instead of integer

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Richard Broersma
<richard(dot)broersma(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Yan Cheng Cheok <yccheok(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
>> instead of let customer_id being type as integer, can i let it be serial? is there any difference?
>>
>> if the table referenced by customer_id is having primary key typed big serial, customer_id shall be declared as bigint ?
>
> This is a good section about the distinction between:
>
> serial -> integer
> bigserial -> bigint
>
> the short answer is that the serial type is actually is the datatype
> *integer* with the sequence generator attached to the default value of
> the column.
>
> So it only makes sense for primary key to be defined as serial.  A
> serial foreign key would be nonsensical since foreign keys should be
> be generating their own values.

Pretty sure the OP was talking about referencing a bigserial from a
foreign key, which makes perfect sense for certain types of mappings.
FKs don't generate their own values, they reference values in a PK or
unique field somewhere else really.