Re: [HACKERS] Happy column dropping

On Sun, 23 Jan 2000, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

> Its not the *risk* that bothers me, its the lack of discussions ... IMHO,
> he should have brought up the "I'm in the process of toasting the reliance
> on OIDs" topic *before* implementing it ... give other ppl a chance to
> possibly present alternatives ...


From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> 
To: Alain TESIO <tesio@easynet.fr> 
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] A script which drops a column 
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 23:36:42 -0500 (EST) 

> Hello,
> 
> You may be interested by a script which drops a column as this
> feature isn't supported by Postgresql. I guess it could be easier
> and nice in Perl or something similar but I'm using what I know.
> 
> The parameters are in that order :
> 
> the name of the database
> the table
> the column to drop
> 
> Alain
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> psql -d $1 -c "\d $2" | awk 'BEGIN { keep=1 } /+-/ { keep=1-keep } { if
> (keep) { print } }' | grep -v "\-\-" | grep -v "Table *=" | grep -v " $3
" |
> sed "s/| \([^ ]*\).*/\1/" | tr -s \\012 "," | sed "s/,$//" | sed
> "s/\(.*\)/select \1 into temp tmp_drop_column from $2 ; drop table $2 ;
> select * into $2 from tmp_drop_column;/" > tmp_sql_drop_column
> psql -d $1 -f tmp_sql_drop_column
> rm tmp_sql_drop_column

The fact is that internally this is exactly what we would have to do to
drop a column.  Now that we have temp tables, maybe someone could code
up some C to do this, or just an pg_exec_query_dest() call to do the
job.


-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026


I think what I did is significantly better than that, and of course it
will be cleaned up by next week.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders vaeg 10:115
peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden