I am a new user to PG (graduating from Access) and had some problems with inheritance. I stumbled into the inheritance to-do discussion and would like to put in my two cents. I apologize if this is not the right place to be sending this.
It seems PG needs two separate types of inheritance: structural inheritance and 'is-a' inheritance. Structural inheritance would help the 'inheritance is a convenience' people. Structural children would inherit foreign keys and per-field validation. Structural children would not inherit primary keys, or would allow a primary key declared on the child to override the parent's primary key, not augment it. I think structural children should have separate indices (by the same name if possible) from the parent. 'is-a' children would inherit all constraints and share indices and primary keys with the parent and any siblings, descendants, etc. Of course this can all be achieved currently by specifying the parent with no primary key and adding a primary key to the descendants. But it seems that making this sort of thing more explicit with 'inherit-struct' and 'inherit-is-a' would clear up a lot of confusion. Thanks ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
