Hi,

I'm aware that this is a manifestation of the problem mentioned in the
Caveats subsection of the Inheritance section.  I want to emphasize it,
and maybe rattle your cage a bit.

I find the Postgres notion of inheritance very compelling. Conceptually
it does what I want, when I create tables of related, but different kinds
of things.

Unfortunately these little ommissions really foul up implementations
using inheritance.

For instance:  a field that REFERENCES a field in an inherited table is 
unaware that records have been added to the inherited table, by way of 
records being added to inheriting tables.

This is awful.  One is forced to make choices between various evils.

EXAMPLE:
============================================================================

CREATE TABLE a (
  a_id   SERIAL PRIMARY KEY
);

CREATE TABLE a1 (
) INHERITS( a );

CREATE TABLE a2 (
) INHERITS( a );

CREATE TABLE b (
  b_id   SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  a_id   INTEGER,
  FOREIGN KEY (a_id) REFERENCES a(a_id)
);
-- ---------------------------------------

INSERT INTO a1 VALUES( DEFAULT );

-- The following results in a foreign key violation, saying
-- no row with a_id=1 is present in table "a":
INSERT INTO b VALUES( DEFAULT, CURRVAL('a_a_id_seq') );

-- However this indicates that table "a" has a row with a_id=1:
SELECT * FROM a;

============================================================================

Cheers!

-- 
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| e-Science / AstroGrid-D                                   Zi. 35  Bg. 20
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| An der Sternwarte 16, D-14482 Potsdam
|
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|
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