You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Clarify behavior of adding and altering a column in same ALTER command.
The behavior of something like
ALTER TABLE transactions
ADD COLUMN status varchar(30) DEFAULT 'old',
ALTER COLUMN status SET default 'current';
is to fill existing table rows with 'old', not 'current'. That's
intentional and desirable for a couple of reasons:
* It makes the behavior the same whether you merge the sub-commands
into one ALTER command or give them separately;
* If we applied the new default while filling the table, there would
be no way to get the existing behavior in one SQL command.
The same reasoning applies in cases that add a column and then
manipulate its GENERATED/IDENTITY status in a second sub-command,
since the generation expression is really just a kind of default.
However, that wasn't very obvious (at least not to me; earlier in
the referenced discussion thread I'd thought it was a bug to be
fixed). And it certainly wasn't documented.
Hence, add documentation, code comments, and a test case to clarify
that this behavior is all intentional.
In passing, adjust ATExecAddColumn's defaults-related relkind check
so that it matches up exactly with ATRewriteTables, instead of being
effectively (though not literally) the negated inverse condition.
The reasoning can be explained a lot more concisely that way, too
(not to mention that the comment now matches the code, which it
did not before).
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/10365.1558909428@sss.pgh.pa.us
0 commit comments