From: Steve Crawford <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com>
To: Marc Fromm <Marc.Fromm@wwu.edu>
Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org <pgsql-admin@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: primary key and insert
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:39:43 -0800
Message-ID: <4941B2CF.1040906@pinpointresearch.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <B0D7C0A3F35FE144A70312D086CBCA9B0213C0B95D@ExchMailbox2.univ.dir.wwu.edu>
References: <B0D7C0A3F35FE144A70312D086CBCA9B0213C0B95D@ExchMailbox2.univ.dir.wwu.edu>
Marc Fromm wrote:
> I created this table:
> ...
> id | integer | not null
> Indexes:
> "alert_list_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
> I get this error when I run the insert a listed below. The insert does
> not have an entry for the primary key "id" since I thought it updates
> automatically:
> *Warning*: pg_query() [function.pg-query
> <http://finaid46.finaid.wwu.edu/lan/student_alerts/function.pg-query;]:
> Query failed: ERROR: null value in column "id" violates not-null
> constraint
> ...
> How do I do an insert on this table and have the primary key "id"
> update with the record?
>
I think you are confusing primary key and serial.
A column can be a primary key (not-null, unique row id) or a serial
(actually automatically creates an integer type, a sequence, and a
default for the column of nextval('sequence') to automatically generate
a new value for each record).
A primary key could be a serial, but doesn't have to be.
A serial can be a primary key but doesn't have to be.
Note: due to things like transaction rollbacks, a serial column will
have unique IDs generated but they are not guaranteed to be consecutive.
Cheers,
Steve
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To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Cc: scrawford@pinpointresearch.com, Marc.Fromm@wwu.edu
Subject: Re: primary key and insert
In-Reply-To: <4941B2CF.1040906@pinpointresearch.com>
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