Thanks Tom, I understand now the thinking behind disallowing the drop index ... cascade. If only I'd spent a little bit more time thinking it thru properly! I do though think the error message could do with a slight change of wording from:
ERROR: Cannot drop index t1_pkey because constraint c1 on table t1 requires it You may drop constraint c1 on table t1 instead to: ERROR: Cannot drop index t1_pkey because constraint c1 on table t1 requires it To drop index t1_pkey you will need to drop the constraint c1 from table t1 first I'd imagine that putting a caveat for foreign key dependencies in the docs for DROP INDEX would probably cause more confusion than it would help stop! I have just started learning C so I'm not currently able to offer much, other than the odd bug report. I hope to change that soon! As an aside their's an interesting article on WAL's at http://www.dbazine.com/gulutzan2.html Best Regards, Tim Knowles -----Original Message----- From: Tom Lane [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 27 September 2002 16:34 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [BUGS] Bug #785: 7.3b2 : Possible Inconsistency with DROP INDEX ... CASCADE and DROP CONSTRAINT [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > CREATE TABLE t1 ( > col_a int, > PRIMARY KEY (col_a) > ); > --DROP INDEX t1_pkey CASCADE WILL NOT CASCADE THE DROP TO DEPENDENT OBJECTS > DROP INDEX t1_pkey CASCADE; > --ALTER TABLE .. DROP .. CASCADE WILL CASCADE THE DROP TO THE FOREIGN KEY CONSTRAINT > ALTER TABLE t1 DROP CONSTRAINT t1_pkey CASCADE; This is deliberate: you created the index indirectly via a constraint, so you should drop the constraint rather than dropping the index itself. Essentially, the index is only an implementation detail that you should not be messing with directly. Or at least that was the design idea. If you think this is wrongheaded, feel free to start a discussion about it on pghackers. It might be that the behavior is okay but the error message should be phrased differently in this case. Any thoughts? regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly