Chapter 9. Inheritance

Let's create two classes. The capitals class contains state capitals which are also cities. Naturally, the capitals class should inherit from cities.

CREATE TABLE cities (
    name            text,
    population      float,
    altitude        int     -- (in ft)
);

CREATE TABLE capitals (
    state           char(2)
) INHERITS (cities);

In this case, an instance of capitals inherits all attributes (name, population, and altitude) from its parent, cities. The type of the attribute name is text, a native Postgres type for variable length ASCII strings. The type of the attribute population is float, a native Postgres type for double precision floating point numbers. State capitals have an extra attribute, state, that shows their state. In Postgres, a class can inherit from zero or more other classes, and a query can reference either all instances of a class or all instances of a class plus all of its descendants.

Note: The inheritance hierarchy is a actually a directed acyclic graph.

For example, the following query finds all the cities that are situated at an attitude of 500ft or higher:

SELECT name, altitude
    FROM cities
    WHERE altitude > 500;

   name    | altitude
-----------+----------
 Las Vegas |     2174
 Mariposa  |     1953
(2 rows)

On the other hand, to find the names of all cities, including state capitals, that are located at an altitude over 500ft, the query is:

SELECT c.name, c.altitude
    FROM cities* c
    WHERE c.altitude > 500;

which returns:

   name    | altitude
-----------+----------
 Las Vegas |     2174
 Mariposa  |     1953
 Madison   |      845

Here the "*" after cities indicates that the query should be run over cities and all classes below cities in the inheritance hierarchy. Many of the commands that we have already discussed -- SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE -- support this "*" notation, as do others, like ALTER TABLE.