Thom Brown <t...@linux.com> writes: > Would it be possible (or reasonable) to add support for changing the type of > a column to serial or bigserial (yes, yes, I know they're not actual > types)?
We've looked at that in the past and decided there were enough corner cases that it wasn't clearly a good idea. In particular, what do you do with the existing data in the column? What do you do if there's already a DEFAULT expression for the column, throw it away? In particular, what of the special case that the column is in fact already a serial, so the default is pointing at an existing sequence? It is possible to accomplish everything that such a command would do manually, so the argument for having it boils down to wanting it to be a bit easier. But unless the command can always do the right thing automatically, I'm not sure "easy" is a good argument. There's also the objection that such an operation would actually have very little to do with ALTER COLUMN TYPE --- most of the things it would do are not that. The fact that serial was bolted on as a fake type is a wart that maybe we shouldn't extend in this particular fashion. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers