"James B. Byrne" <byrnejb(at)harte-lyne(dot)ca> writes:
> I am testing Idempiere and have run across this in an example:
> character(1) DEFAULT 'Y'::bpchar NOT NULL,
> How does this differ from
> character(1) DEFAULT 'Y' NOT NULL,
It doesn't. The former is just written with an explicit cast,
which the latter lacks, but the end result will be the same
because the parser will coerce the DEFAULT expression to the
column's type anyway.
(It helps to know that for reasons lost in the depths of time,
Postgres' internal name for the char(N) type is "bpchar".)
regards, tom lane