Subject: Re: rename of a view
From: Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Euler Taveira de Oliveira <euler@timbira.com>,
	David Fetter <david@fetter.org>,
	Susanne Ebrecht <miracee@miracee.de>, pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
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	<20070629183219.GO7636@fetter.org> <20070630001653.GQ7636@fetter.org>
	<4685D8C8.2070808@timbira.com> <12776.1183177571@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<1183181585.20942.1.camel@goldbach>  <15084.1183181782@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:43:41 -0700
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On Sat, 2007-30-06 at 01:36 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> No objection to that; it'd square with our treatment of TYPE and DOMAIN
> commands.  What I'm wondering though is whether the whole patch has
> a reason to live at all, as compared to documenting someplace more
> prominent than now that ALTER TABLE works on views & sequences.

Using ALTER TABLE to rename views and sequences is quite counter-
intuitive, and has been a repeated source of confusion for users. Sure,
we can document that behavior more prominently, but it seems to me it
would be more straightforward in the long-run to just make the system
behave more intuitively in the first place. As an added bonus, it takes
very little new code to implement.

For the ALTER SEQUENCE case, I think it's also a little weird to have an
ALTER SEQUENCE command that modifies some of the properties of a
sequence, but not the sequence's name. While that argument doesn't apply
to ALTER VIEW at the moment, recent history suggests that it may only be
a matter of time before we need to add an ALTER VIEW command anyway...
(for instance, to control the properties of materialized or updateable
views).

-Neil