Sequences and views could previously be renamed using ALTER TABLE, but
this was a repeated source of confusion for users. Update the docs,
and psql tab completion. Patch from David Fetter; various minor fixes
by myself.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
by abandoning the idea that it should say SERIAL in the dump. Instead,
dump serial sequences and column defaults just like regular ones.
Add a new backend command ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY to let pg_dump recreate
the sequence-to-column dependency that was formerly created "behind the
scenes" by SERIAL. This restores SERIAL to being truly "just a macro"
consisting of component operations that can be stated explicitly in SQL.
Furthermore, the new command allows sequence ownership to be reassigned,
so that old mistakes can be cleaned up.
Also, downgrade the OWNED-BY dependency from INTERNAL to AUTO, since there
is no longer any very compelling argument why the sequence couldn't be
dropped while keeping the column. (This forces initdb, to be sure the
right kinds of dependencies are in there.)
Along the way, add checks to prevent ALTER OWNER or SET SCHEMA on an
owned sequence; you can now only do this indirectly by changing the
owning table's owner or schema. This is an oversight in previous
releases, but probably not worth back-patching.
SGML markup, add a "deprecated features" section to the 8.0 release
notes, untabify release.sgml and runtime.sgml, and make some other
minor improvements.
Add ALTER SEQUENCE to modify min/max/increment/cache/cycle values
Also updated create sequence docs to mention NO MINVALUE, & NO MAXVALUE.
New Files:
doc/src/sgml/ref/alter_sequence.sgml
src/test/regress/expected/sequence.out
src/test/regress/sql/sequence.sql
ALTER SEQUENCE is NOT transactional. It behaves similarly to setval().
It matches the proposed SQL200N spec, as well as Oracle in most ways --
Oracle lacks RESTART WITH for some strange reason.
--
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
