Re: CREATE TABLE LIKE and SERIAL

Tom Lane wrote:

> Thinking of SERIAL as a type is your first mistake ;-). It is not a
> type. It is a shorthand for making a sequence and sticking a suitable
> default on a plain integer column. So what LIKE sees is an integer
> column with a default, and it copies that.

That's entirely fair, and the manual section dealing with types is very
careful to start off with "The data types serial and bigserial are not
true types".

However I think that the description of CREATE TABLE ... LIKE really
could do with a "health warning" for this case.

Looking at this very slightly deeper and assuming that the user is aware
of the pitfalls, it's obviously easy for him to create a new sequence
and to use it as the default value. But what if he wants the new
sequence to inherit the current state of an existing one: might I
suggest CREATE SEQUENCE ... LIKE would be appropriate here?

--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]