Thread

Re: [BUGS] Running queries on inherited tables

Michael Richards <miker@scifair.acadiau.ca> — 1999-09-12T18:41:48Z

On Sun, 12 Sep 1999, Tom Lane wrote:

> You have to say "alter table cities*", I believe, otherwise only cities
> is changed.  Which is pretty broken --- if inheritance means anything,
> then it ought to mean that the alteration is *inherently* applied to all
> the child tables too, and you shouldn't have the option.  In general,
Would this be a simple change in parsing the statement to see if it has
any children and translate the statement accordingly?

> (mostly from Chris Bitmead, I think).  ALTER TABLE really needs a
> reimplementation from the ground up, but I dunno when anyone will get
Considering how often Alter table is used, would it be reasonable to rip
out all the alter table code and just have it do a select into;drop;rename
that would be nice in that dropping/adding columns would be easy,
inheritance would (should) be preserved and it's simple. 

Of course I wouldn't want to do this on a 5Gb table...


-Michael