Re: BUG #17720: pg_dump creates a dump with primary key that cannot be restored, when specifying 'using index ...'

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>
Cc: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>, "zedaardv@drizzle.com" <zedaardv@drizzle.com>, "pgsql-bugs@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-bugs@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2022-12-14T15:37:02Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs
Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> writes:
> On 14 Dec 2022, at 13:54, David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:
>> There is a decent chance that the fix here is to prohibit doing what you did here - a PK cannot contain nulls in any of its columns so indeed choosing an index that specifies how nulls behave is non-sensical.  That said, it also doesn’t hurt so long as the column itself is indeed not null.  But extending the syntax doesn’t seem that appealing.

> Even if we prohibit this, there is still the case of all existing systems which
> can't be dumped.  I wonder if the solution is to teach pg_dump to not create
> NULLS NOT DISTINCT primary key constraints?  The simple attached fix creates a
> valid PK constraint on the above schema.

It doesn't make sense for pg_dump to editorialize on a schema that
we otherwise consider valid; people would rightfully complain that
dump/restore changed things.  So we need to do both things: prohibit
adopting such an index as a PK constraint (but I guess it's okay
for plain unique constraints?), and adjust pg_dump to compensate
for the legacy case where it was already done.

			regards, tom lane



Commits

  1. Disallow NULLS NOT DISTINCT indexes for primary keys