Message-ID: <42027FC6.9020501@commandprompt.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 11:47:18 -0800
From: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>
Organization: Command Prompt, Inc.
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To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au>,
	Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: pg_dump bug in 7.3.9 with sequences
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	<11680.1107406182@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<4201EE8D.4010408@familyhealth.com.au>
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Tom Lane wrote:
> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> 
>>>pg_dump will just emit "create table t1 (f1 serial)" with no hint that
>>>the sequence ought to be set to CYCLE mode.  I'm not sure about an
>>>appropriate fix offhand --- we can't very well use ALTER SEQUENCE in
>>>just this way in the dump, because of the risk of the sequence name
>>>being possibly different at reload.  (Come to think of it, we are not
>>>very good about propagating GRANTs on the sequence either, because of
>>>the same risk.)
> 
> 
>>I suggest some time ago an alternative syntax for ALTER SEQUENCE.
> 
> 
> Could work, but we'd have to support it for GRANT/REVOKE too, which is
> starting to get ugly.  (Now, if we went down the recently suggested path
> of allowing sub-selects to compute the target object names for all
> utility statements, this would fall out nicely.  But having a special
> case in ALTER SEQUENCE and GRANT seems pretty wart-ish.)
> 
> Another alternative I was thinking about in the shower this morning is
> to have pg_dump treat the sequence as an independent object.  So the
> dump script would CREATE it, set parameters and GRANTs, just the same as
> for a plain sequence, and then do a magic ALTER TABLE command that
> attaches it to the serial column, which the script would initially
> declare as a plain integer or bigint.  This seems relatively clean to me
> because it is in the same spirit as the way we handle index constraints
> now: they aren't in the initial table definition but get added by ALTER
> at a suitable time.  However the "magic command" is a big wart of its
> own, no doubt.  It's not just an ALTER COLUMN TYPE command because you'd
> need to be able to specify the name of the sequence to attach.  It's not
> just an ALTER SET DEFAULT, either, because it would have special
> side-effects on pg_depend.

Wouldn't a lot of this be solved (I know I am over simplyfing) by making
serial a real type? E.g; if you have type serial it is type serial not
type integer with a default of nextval('sequence'). Thus if I have an
integer with a default of (anything really) that is how it is restore.
If I have a serial, it is a serial and is restored in that manner.

Using this idea, you would get the can't alter default of a serial but
also the ability to alter the default if it is NOT a serial but will
still auto-increment.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake


> 
> 			regards, tom lane
> 
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