In a Postgres 9.3 table I have an integer as primary key with automatic sequence to increment, but I have reached the maximum for integer. How to convert it from integer to serial?
I tried:
ALTER TABLE my_table ALTER COLUMN id SET DATA TYPE bigint;
But the same does not work with the data type serial instead of bigint. Seems like I cannot convert to serial?
serial is a pseudo data type, not an actual data type. It's an integer underneath with some additional DDL commands executed automatically:
Create a SEQUENCE (with matching name by default).
Set the column NOT NULL and the default to draw from that sequence.
Make the column "own" the sequence.
Details:
Safely rename tables using serial primary key columns
A bigserial is the same, built around a bigint column. You want bigint, but you already achieved that. To transform an existing serial column into a bigserial (or smallserial), all you need to do is ALTER the data type of the column. Sequences are generally based on bigint, so the same sequence can be used for any integer type.
To "change" a bigint into a bigserial or an integer into a serial, you just have to do the rest by hand:
Creating a PostgreSQL sequence to a field (which is not the ID of the record)
The actual data type is still integer / bigint. Some clients like pgAdmin will display the data type serial in the reverse engineered CREATE TABLE script, if all criteria for a serial are met.
Related
In a Postgres 9.3 table I have an integer as primary key with automatic sequence to increment, but I have reached the maximum for integer. How to convert it from integer to serial?
I tried:
ALTER TABLE my_table ALTER COLUMN id SET DATA TYPE bigint;
But the same does not work with the data type serial instead of bigint. Seems like I cannot convert to serial?
serial is a pseudo data type, not an actual data type. It's an integer underneath with some additional DDL commands executed automatically:
Create a SEQUENCE (with matching name by default).
Set the column NOT NULL and the default to draw from that sequence.
Make the column "own" the sequence.
Details:
Safely rename tables using serial primary key columns
A bigserial is the same, built around a bigint column. You want bigint, but you already achieved that. To transform an existing serial column into a bigserial (or smallserial), all you need to do is ALTER the data type of the column. Sequences are generally based on bigint, so the same sequence can be used for any integer type.
To "change" a bigint into a bigserial or an integer into a serial, you just have to do the rest by hand:
Creating a PostgreSQL sequence to a field (which is not the ID of the record)
The actual data type is still integer / bigint. Some clients like pgAdmin will display the data type serial in the reverse engineered CREATE TABLE script, if all criteria for a serial are met.
I am a little confused and new to PostgreSql , I thought that serial = integer and bigserial = bigint, so I am confused why I see a sequence with a max val of 9223372036854775807 instead of 2147483647, when I create a table with a PK that is serial.
As stated in the PostgreSQL 9.4 docs for Data Type SERIAL a sequence is implicitly created using CREATE SEQUENCE tablename_colname_seq without any additional parameters.
The documentation for CREATE SEQUENCE says:
The optional clause MAXVALUE maxvalue determines the maximum value for the sequence. If this clause is not supplied or NO MAXVALUE is specified, then default values will be used. The defaults are 2^63-1 and -1 for ascending and descending sequences, respectively.
So it is documented behaviour that the sequence is created with the max value you are seing.
The sequence and the column are two separate things. A sequence could return an integer larger than an int4 column could store. When you specify SERIAL or BIGSERIAL, PostgreSQL roughly translates that into:
create an int4 or int8 column
create a sequence
make the sequence owned by the column
make the column default value the next value from the sequence
SERIAL is a convenience, but there is not an actual column type SERIAL.
In a Postgres 9.3 table I have an integer as primary key with automatic sequence to increment, but I have reached the maximum for integer. How to convert it from integer to serial?
I tried:
ALTER TABLE my_table ALTER COLUMN id SET DATA TYPE bigint;
But the same does not work with the data type serial instead of bigint. Seems like I cannot convert to serial?
serial is a pseudo data type, not an actual data type. It's an integer underneath with some additional DDL commands executed automatically:
Create a SEQUENCE (with matching name by default).
Set the column NOT NULL and the default to draw from that sequence.
Make the column "own" the sequence.
Details:
Safely rename tables using serial primary key columns
A bigserial is the same, built around a bigint column. You want bigint, but you already achieved that. To transform an existing serial column into a bigserial (or smallserial), all you need to do is ALTER the data type of the column. Sequences are generally based on bigint, so the same sequence can be used for any integer type.
To "change" a bigint into a bigserial or an integer into a serial, you just have to do the rest by hand:
Creating a PostgreSQL sequence to a field (which is not the ID of the record)
The actual data type is still integer / bigint. Some clients like pgAdmin will display the data type serial in the reverse engineered CREATE TABLE script, if all criteria for a serial are met.
I'm using Grails 3.0.7 and Postgres 9.2. I'm very new to Postgres, so this may be a dumb question. How do I correctly associate an id generator sequence with a table? I read somewhere that if you create a table with an id column that has a serial datatype, then it will automatically create a sequence for that table.
However, the column seems to be created with a type of bigint. How do I get Grails to create the column with a bigserial datatype, and will this even solve my problem? What if I want one sequence per table? I'm just not sure how to go about setting this up because I've never really used Postgres in the past.
You can define a generator in a domain class like this:
static mapping = {
id generator:'sequence', params:[sequence:'domain_sq']
}
If the sequence is already present in the database then you'll need to name it in the params.
There are other properties also available as outlined in the documentation, for example:
static mapping = {
id column: 'book_id', type: 'integer'
}
In Postgres 10 or later consider an IDENTITY column instead. See:
Auto increment table column
However, the column seems to be created with a type of bigint. How do
I get Grails to create the column with a bigserial datatype, and will
this even solve my problem?
That's expected behavior. Define the column as bigserial, that's all you have to do. The Postgres pseudo data types smallserial, serial and bigserial create a smallint, int or bigint column respectively, and attach a dedicated sequence. The manual:
The data types smallserial, serial and bigserial are not true types,
but merely a notational convenience for creating unique identifier
columns (similar to the AUTO_INCREMENT property supported by some
other databases). In the current implementation, specifying:
CREATE TABLE tablename (
colname SERIAL
);
is equivalent to specifying:
CREATE SEQUENCE tablename_colname_seq;
CREATE TABLE tablename (
colname integer NOT NULL DEFAULT nextval('tablename_colname_seq')
);
ALTER SEQUENCE tablename_colname_seq OWNED BY tablename.colname;
Big quote, I couldn't describe it any better than the manual.
Related:
Get table and column "owning" a sequence
Safely rename tables using serial primary key columns
I have a table with 8440 records with a natural (string) primary key. Now I just discovered that to support a legacy client, I need the records to have integer keys as well. what's the easiest way to add a serial INT column to this table with a unique constraint and populate it with integer values from 1 to 8440?
Alter the table, add a new not null column of type serial, with a unique key on it.
In Postgres, the serial type is a mere alias for the int type with a default value of nextval(some_sequence), the latter of which is created on the fly.