Re: Improvement for COPY command .. unless it already exists

On Apr 7, 2005, at 10:33 AM, David Gagnon wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I want to default some columns for this COPY command only. So DEFAULT
> is not appropriate in this case. In fact I think you suggested a
> workaround right ? Doing an alter table before and another one after
> will work ... not fully clean thought since my user may not have the
> write to modify the table. Being able to specify default values
> directly in the COPY command will be really nice :-) I just wanted to
> share my tought :-)
>
> Being eable to read zipped file will be cool to .. but I'm not sure
> it's Chrismas yet right so I didn't ask ;-)
>
> Thanks for your help
> /David

David,

If you use a simple wrapper around copy using DBI (as either an
untrusted perl database function) or straight perl, you could read
zipped files as a filehandle.

As for defaults, you could also write a trigger to accomplish the
"default" behavior or, if you use the above perl-based loader, you
could implement defaults as well....

Sean

>
> Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> David Gagnon <dgagnon(at)siunik(dot)com> writes:
>>
>>> Is there a way to specify default values in the COPY command?
>>>
>>
>> There's always ALTER TABLE ... SET DEFAULT.
>>
>> regards, tom lane
>>
>>
>
>
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