ADD OR ALTER column

Started by Geoff Winklessabout 8 years ago4 messagesgeneral
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#1Geoff Winkless
pgsqladmin@geoff.dj

I'm probably missing something, but can anyone see a reason why adding an
ADD OR ALTER COLUMN syntax to the ALTER TABLE command isn't either a)
achievable or b) desirable?

It seems to me to be eminently useful and not overly difficult, while
potentially saving a significant amount of effort on the part of users.

Geoff

#2Rakesh Kumar
rakeshkumar464@mail.com
In reply to: Geoff Winkless (#1)
Re: ADD OR ALTER column

I'm probably missing something, but can anyone see a reason why adding an ADD OR >ALTER COLUMN syntax to the ALTER TABLE command isn't either a) achievable or b) >desirable?
It seems to me to be eminently useful and not overly difficult, while potentially >saving a significant amount of effort on the part of users.

what is your use case ? Not sure what benefit you are talking about.

thanks.

#3Andreas Joseph Krogh
andreas@visena.com
In reply to: Geoff Winkless (#1)
Sv: ADD OR ALTER column

På fredag 12. januar 2018 kl. 14:45:07, skrev Geoff Winkless <
pgsqladmin@geoff.dj <mailto:pgsqladmin@geoff.dj>>:
I'm probably missing something, but can anyone see a reason why adding an ADD
OR ALTER COLUMN syntax to the ALTER TABLE command isn't either a) achievable or
b) desirable?
 
It seems to me to be eminently useful and not overly difficult, while
potentially saving a significant amount of effort on the part of users.
 
Geoff

 
What about using
ALTER TABLE tab ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS mycol mytype;
 
I don't think there's an ALTER COLUMN IF EXISTS tho...
 
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CTO / Partner - Visena AS
Mobile: +47 909 56 963
andreas@visena.com <mailto:andreas@visena.com>
www.visena.com <https://www.visena.com&gt;
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#4Geoff Winkless
pgsqladmin@geoff.dj
In reply to: Rakesh Kumar (#2)
Re: ADD OR ALTER column

On 12 January 2018 at 13:56, Rakesh Kumar <rakeshkumar464@mail.com> wrote:

I'm probably missing something, but can anyone see a reason why adding an

ADD OR >ALTER COLUMN syntax to the ALTER TABLE command isn't either a)
achievable or b) >desirable?

It seems to me to be eminently useful and not overly difficult, while

potentially >saving a significant amount of effort on the part of users.

what is your use case ? Not sure what benefit you are talking about.

Having one script to ensure the user has the latest version of a db,
without a significant amount of to-and-fro effort.

Actually I would probably rather have CREATE OR ALTER TABLE instead, with
the syntax of CREATE TABLE but with an optional USING clause for each
column for use if the column already existed and was of a
non-implicitly-castable type, along with an optional WITH DROP COLUMNS [ *
| name [,...] ] clause (to allow user to drop any (or specific) columns not
in the new definition).

That's likely to be rather more effort though, at first glance.

Geoff​