Re: Inheritance in PostgreSQL

On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 5:36 PM Jeff Laing <Jeff(dot)Laing(at)synchronoss(dot)com>
wrote:

> “Don’t use table inheritance” IS on that page
>

Yeah, inheritance probably would have been removed a long time ago except
that it was underneath the partitioning feature. The basic idea of
implementing polymorphic record storage essentially hacks SQL in a way it
doesn't want to be hacks, thus the feature never really worked properly.
If you want variant storage, use hstore, json, etc. or use the various
techniques that split the entity across multiple tables.

The only thing you can't really do in SQL easily without writing nasty
triggers are things like, 'this table must be linked from one and only one
of these candidate tables'. I think the language probably ought to support
this, but I don't think postgres would unless the standard did. I try to
avoid handwriting RI when possible in triggers, but in this case it's the
only approach that works within language constraints and can
formally validate the model.

merlin

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