Re: Is there any different for foreign key to be serial instead of integer

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Yan Cheng Cheok <yccheok(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:

> instead of let customer_id being type as integer, can i let it be serial? is there any difference?
>
> if the table referenced by customer_id is having primary key typed big serial, customer_id shall be declared as bigint ?

This is a good section about the distinction between:

serial -> integer
bigserial -> bigint

the short answer is that the serial type is actually is the datatype
*integer* with the sequence generator attached to the default value of
the column.

So it only makes sense for primary key to be defined as serial. A
serial foreign key would be nonsensical since foreign keys should be
be generating their own values.

--
Regards,
Richard Broersma Jr.

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