On 25/08/2019 19:42, Tom Lane wrote: > Vik Fearing <vik.fear...@2ndquadrant.com> writes: >> On 25/08/2019 18:59, Tom Lane wrote: >>> Vik Fearing <vik.fear...@2ndquadrant.com> writes: >>>> Is there a reason why the serial pseudotypes still behave as they did >>>> pre-v10 and don't map to GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY these days? >>> Backwards compatibility? >> With what? > Applications that expect declaring a serial column to result in the same > catalog side-effects as before. The default expressions look different, > and the dependencies look different. For instance, an app that expected > atthasdef to tell it something about what happens when a column's value > is omitted would be surprised. An app that thought it could alter the > default expression for a column originally declared serial would be even > more surprised. > > Admittedly, many of these things look a lot like the sort of system > catalog changes we make routinely and expect applications to cope.
Indeed. > But I don't think this would be a cost-free change. Serials have acted > the way they do for a pretty long time. I guess I'll keep telling people serials are obsolete then. -- Vik Fearing