Dropping a column

Started by Patrick Alandabout 25 years ago2 messagesgeneral
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#1Patrick Aland
paland@stetson.edu

I know how to drop a column from a table by selecting into a new table the columns I want to keep. However the problem I am running into is that some of the columns in my original table have certain attibutes (auto incrememnting, default values, etc) however the method of:

SELECT id,name,description INTO TABLE temp FROM origtable;
DROP TABLE origtable;
ALTER TABLE temp RENAME TO origtable;

Preserves my data but not the extra column information (at least according to a \d tablename)

Anyone know if it is possible to do this?

Thanks.

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Patrick Aland paland@stetson.edu
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#2Guy Fraser
guy@incentre.net
In reply to: Patrick Aland (#1)
Re: Dropping a column

Patrick Aland wrote:

I know how to drop a column from a table by selecting into a new table the columns I want to keep. However the problem I am running into is that some of the columns in my original table have certain attibutes (auto incrememnting, default values, etc) however the method of:

SELECT id,name,description INTO TABLE temp FROM origtable;
DROP TABLE origtable;
ALTER TABLE temp RENAME TO origtable;

Preserves my data but not the extra column information (at least according to a \d tablename)

Anyone know if it is possible to do this?

Thanks.

...snip...

Hi

You can create a new table then :

INSERT INTO newtable (id,name,description) SELECT id,name,description
from origtable;

DROP TABLE origtable;

ALTER TABLE newtable RENAME TO origtable;

That has worked for me in the past, when I noticed this problem.

Guy