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.
the DROP pass rather than the ADD_CONSTR pass. On examining the code I
think this was just an oversight rather than intentional, and it seems
to satisfy the principle of least surprise better than the alternative
solution that was discussed. Add an example to the ref page showing how
to do ALTER TYPE and update the default in one command. Per gripe from
Markus Bertheau that that wasn't possible.
Open items:
There were a few tangentially related issues that have come up that I think
are TODOs. I'm likely to tackle one or two of these next so I'm interested in
hearing feedback on them as well.
. Constraints currently do not know anything about inheritance. Tom suggested
adding a coninhcount and conislocal like attributes have to track their
inheritance status.
. Foreign key constraints currently do not get copied to new children (and
therefore my code doesn't verify them). I don't think it would be hard to
add them and treat them like CHECK constraints.
. No constraints at all are copied to tables defined with LIKE. That makes it
hard to use LIKE to define new partitions. The standard defines LIKE and
specifically says it does not copy constraints. But the standard already has
an option called INCLUDING DEFAULTS; we could always define a non-standard
extension LIKE table INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS that gives the user the option to
request a copy including constraints.
. Personally, I think the whole attislocal thing is bunk. The decision about
whether to drop a column from children tables or not is something that
should be up to the user and trying to DWIM based on whether there was ever
a local definition or the column was acquired purely through inheritance is
hardly ever going to match up with user expectations.
. And of course there's the whole unique and primary key constraint issue. I
think to get any traction at all on this you have a prerequisite of a real
partitioned table implementation where the system knows what the partition
key is so it can recognize when it's a leading part of an index key.
Greg Stark
DROP CONSTRAINT
This form drops constraints on a table. Currently, constraints on tables
are not required to have unique names, so there may be more than one
constraint matching the specified name. All matching constraints will be
dropped.
To my knowledge, it is no longer possible to create constraints with the
same name for the same relation. When you create a constraint and specify
the same name explictly, an error is raised. Implicit constraint creation
won't choose an existing name either and up to now you could not rename a
constraint. Renaming works with the patch I sent in a few hours ago but this
patch as well won't allow constraints with identical names on the same
relation.
The attached patch thus removes the note in the docs.
Joachim Wieland
This was not especially critical before, but it is now that we track
ownership dependencies --- the dependency for the rowtype *must* shift
to the new owner. Spotted by Bernd Helmle.
Also fix a problem introduced by recent change to allow non-superusers
to do ALTER OWNER in some cases: if the table had a toast table, ALTER
OWNER failed *even for superusers*, because the test being applied would
conclude that the new would-be owner had no create rights on pg_toast.
A side-effect of the fix is to disallow changing the ownership of indexes
or toast tables separately from their parent table, which seems a good
idea on the whole.
at the top level of the column's old default expression before adding
an implicit coercion to the new column type. This seems to satisfy the
principle of least surprise, as per discussion of bug #1290.
* ALTER ... ADD COLUMN with defaults and NOT NULL constraints works per SQL
spec. A default is implemented by rewriting the table with the new value
stored in each row.
* ALTER COLUMN TYPE. You can change a column's datatype to anything you
want, so long as you can specify how to convert the old value. Rewrites
the table. (Possible future improvement: optimize no-op conversions such
as varchar(N) to varchar(N+1).)
* Multiple ALTER actions in a single ALTER TABLE command. You can perform
any number of column additions, type changes, and constraint additions with
only one pass over the table contents.
Basic documentation provided in ALTER TABLE ref page, but some more docs
work is needed.
Original patch from Rod Taylor, additional work from Tom Lane.
remove separate implementation of ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS in favor
of doing a regular DROP. Also, cause CREATE TABLE to account completely
correctly for the inheritance status of the OID column. This fixes
problems with dropping OID columns that have dependencies, as noted by
Christopher Kings-Lynne, as well as making sure that you can't drop an
OID column that was inherited from a parent.
proposal for eventually deprecating OIDs on user tables that I posted
earlier to pgsql-hackers. pg_dump now always specifies WITH OIDS or
WITHOUT OIDS when dumping a table. The documentation has been updated.
Neil Conway
- more work from the SGML police
- some grammar improvements: rewriting a paragraph or two, replacing
contractions where (IMHO) appropriate
- fix missing utility commands in lock mode docs
- improve CLUSTER, REINDEX, SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION ref pages
Neil Conway
On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 21:59, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> I agree. I want to remove OIDs from heaps of our tables when we go to 7.3.
> I'd rather not have to do it in the dump due to down time.
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
including:
- replacing all the appropriate usages of <citetitle>PostgreSQL
...</citetitle> with &cite-user;, &cite-admin;, and so on
- fix an omission in the EXECUTE documentation
- add some more text to the EXPLAIN documentation
- improve the PL/PgSQL RETURN NEXT documentation (more work to do here)
- minor markup fixes
Neil Conway
> > This patch improves the documentation of the UPDATE and ALTER TABLE
> > commands to elaborate on the effect of specifying an "ONLY" clause.
>
> Unfortunately this is still only half the truth ... see the
> SQL_INHERITANCE configuration variable.
Okay, I've attached an updated patch with more information on
SQL_INHERITANCE and inheritance behavior in prior releases.
Neil Conway
code review by Tom Lane. Remaining issues: functions that take or
return tuple types are likely to break if one drops (or adds!)
a column in the table defining the type. Need to think about what
to do here.
Along the way: some code review for recent COPY changes; mark system
columns attnotnull = true where appropriate, per discussion a month ago.
attstattarget to indicate 'use the default'. The default is now a GUC
variable default_statistics_target, and so may be changed on the fly. Along
the way we gain the ability to have pg_dump dump the per-column statistics
target when it's not the default. Patch by Neil Conway, with some kibitzing
from Tom Lane.
pg_relcheck is gone; CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, and FOREIGN KEY
constraints all have real live entries in pg_constraint. pg_depend
exists, and RESTRICT/CASCADE options work on most kinds of DROP;
however, pg_depend is not yet very well populated with dependencies.
(Most of the ones that are present at this point just replace formerly
hardwired associations, such as the implicit drop of a relation's pg_type
entry when the relation is dropped.) Need to add more logic to create
dependency entries, improve pg_dump to dump constraints in place of
indexes and triggers, and add some regression tests.
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon