On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 07:47:06PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > "Jim C. Nasby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I think a big point that's being missed here is that SERIAL *is* trying > > to be simple. If you need something more sophisticated or complex you > > shouldn't be using SERIAL at all, you should be doing the stuff > > yourself, by hand. > > I agree with this point in the abstract, but one important proviso is > that it has to be *possible* to do it by hand. One good thing about > the "SERIAL is just a macro" approach is that it keeps us honest about > making sure that SERIAL isn't exploiting any weird internal behaviors > that are hard to duplicate for handmade sequence defaults. We've > already broken that to some extent by having the hidden dependency, > and that in turn means that fairly-reasonable expectations like > "pg_get_serial_sequence should find the column's associated sequence" > don't work on handmade sequences. I don't want to go much further in > that direction. If there's a usability problem we're trying to solve > for SERIALs, we should make sure the problem gets solved for handmade > sequences too. > > regards, tom lane
I agree with Tom's proviso and add one of my own, mentioned earlier. It should be easy to use a sequence w/alter sequence almost all of the time. The majority of the crowd should be able to use SERIAL in the majority of cases. One reason I am adamant about this is the v. useful dependencies that are (should be) set between the table and the sequence when it is declared as a SERIAL. --elein > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
