DROP CONSTRAINT should be able to drop your pkey and as long as your
data supports your new key... you should be set
Gavin
Michael Hannon wrote:
Greetings. We're running Postgres 7.3 on an Intel linux box (Redhat
Enterprise server, version 3.0). We find ourselves in an awkward
position: we have a database of attributes relating to students that
uses as its primary key the ID number of the student. This is awkward
for the following reasons.
Our university used to use social-security numbers for student ID's.
They stopped doing that a few years ago, but didn't force the change
on existing students. Recently they've made a forced, retroactive
change such that ALL students, past and present, now have a student ID
that's not related to social-security number.
I think this a well-justified change, but, unfortunately for us, it
makes many of the primary keys in our database invalid. This problem
is compounded by the fact that the programmer that set up our Postgres
databases has moved on to another job.
Our current programmer would like to start from scratch, redefine the
schema, rebuild the database, etc. Unfortunately, there are a number
of high-profile applications that depend on the database, and many of
them would surely get broken by this kind of transition.
We expect that we WILL eventually rebuild the database, but right now
we're looking for a quick fix. Our current programmer tells me that
he can't find a way to simply change the primary key "in place" in
Postgres.
Is there a way to do this?
Thanks.
- Mike
---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
