On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 23:09 +0200, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote: > Is there any good documentation, example, tutorial, pamphlet, discussion... > to exploit pg features to obtain "polymorphic" behavior without renouncing to > referential integrity? > > Inheritance seems *just* promising. > > Any methodical a approach to the problem in pg context? >
I'm not sure if this answers your question, but here's how I do inheritance in the relational model. Just make a "parent" table that holds a more generic object like: CREATE TABLE person (name TEXT PRIMARY KEY, age INT, height NUMERIC); Then a "child" table like: CREATE TABLE student (name TEXT REFERENCES person(name), gpa NUMERIC); Every person, student or otherwise has a record in "person". If, and only if, they are a student they have a record in the "student" table. To select all people, select only from the "person" table. To select all students, select from the join of the two tables. Regards, Jeff Davis ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: 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