Re: relation vs table...

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 05:50:48AM -0700, Terrence Brannon wrote:
> I don't know what Postgres considers a relation and had no intention of
> creating one when piping my schema to it... I always DROP TABLE before
> CREATE TABLE, so here are the ERRORS emitted when building the database:

Well, when you do a DROP TABLE and there's no table with the name you
give, the system is right in giving you a "table foo does not exist".
However, when you create a foreign key to a table that doesn't exist
(because you are creating it further down in your script), the system
doesn't know it is a table (it could be a view, for example). So it
falls back to using the more general term, "relation".

"Relation" means, in Postgres terms, "anything that can have a pg_class
entry". This means system tables and views, regular tables and views,
indexes, sequences, TOAST tables and special relations like pg_xactlock
if I'm not mistaken.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Estoy de acuerdo contigo en que la verdad absoluta no existe...
El problema es que la mentira sí existe y tu estás mintiendo" (G. Lama)