Re: ALTER SEQUENCE: Missing feature?

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>> I guess it comes down to a philosophical thing. Should people need to
>> know the PostgreSQL internals like the fact that a SEQUENCE is
>> currently implemented as a TABLE, or should they just be able to do
>> reasonable things like call ALTER SEQUENCE when they alter a sequence?
>>
> I would have to second this.

Well, (1) we are not going to be able to hide the implementation fact
entirely --- for instance, you can't readily hide that they share the
same namespace, so that you can't have a table and a sequence of the
same name. People will have to learn this fact about sequences
eventually. For that matter we advertise it by using "SELECT * FROM
sequence" as a way of inspecting sequence parameters; will you invent
a replacement for that?

(2) If you do want to hide it at the cosmetic level you will have more
work to do than this. ALTER TABLE also works (in some variants) on
indexes; will you also invent ALTER INDEX? See also GRANT/REVOKE; will
you change that syntax too? Will you invent new privilege names for
sequences to hide the overlap with table privilege types? Will you
forbid the old spellings of all this stuff (thereby breaking existing
pg_dump files)?

It just seems like a much bigger can of worms to open than the payback
would justify.

regards, tom lane