On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Joe Conway wrote: > > Tom Lane wrote: > > > Joe Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >>I agree 100%. If you want an index, unique constraint, or primary key on > > >>a SERIAL, I think you should explicitly add it. SERIAL should give me a > > >>column that automatically increments -- no more, no less. > > > > > > Hmm, do you also want to eliminate the implicit NOT NULL constraint? > > > > > > I think that efficiency and orthogonality are adequate reasons for > > > dissociating UNIQUE from SERIAL. The efficiency argument is pretty > > > weak in the case of the NOT NULL part, though, so maybe backwards > > > compatibility should win out there. > > > > To be honest I wasn't thinking about NOT NULL. I'd agree with leaving > > that in place. > > > > Maybe I should restate my comment above: SERIAL should give me a column > > that automatically increments -- no more, no less -- and it should not > > allow me to override the value that it gives. Hence an implicit NOT > > NULL, but also an implicit rejection of a manual insert/update of that > > field (how hard would this be to do?). > > If don't understand. We already have a unique index on the SERIAL > column, so why bother rejecting an insert/update that supplies the > value? We need the column to be unique, and that is forced, but why > prevent _any_ unique value from being used. One reason is that the sequence won't respect those inserted values and you'll get uniqueness errors on statements that don't give a value for the column where you'd expect to be getting a working autogenerated value. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
