> > Nope. As much as I love PostgreSQL it doesn't support > > *really useful* table inheritance. > It is *very* useful, believe me. Despite a few minor grudges. LOL. No need to convince me as I am the one who had the guts to depend on table inheritance in the GnuMed schema :-)
However, "minor grudges" is an understatement as one needs to be *very* careful about things: don't (try to) inherit triggers don't (try to) inherit foreign key constraints be extra careful about "inherited" primary keys - it is ALWAYS a good idea to let them be of type SERIAL > > - primary keyness doesn't inherit > > No. But you can manually set the primary key constraint in the child table to > the parent's primary key. This is actually necessary, since not in all > derived tables you actually want the parent's primary key to be the primary > key. Ah, well, I should have been more precise. Key value UNIQUENESS doesn't inherit. But in many cases one does want it to be unique. That's the catch. >> - foreign key constraints are broken ... > Yes, this is a bit extra work. But even without it, table inheritance is > already really useful (see our very own audit trailing system in gnumed) Well, ROTFL, like, I wrote it. But note how we attach the actual audit triggers to the leaf tables !! Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346
