• Tom Lane's avatar
    Rearrange ALTER TABLE syntax processing as per my recent proposal: the · a0b012a1
    Tom Lane authored
    grammar allows ALTER TABLE/INDEX/SEQUENCE/VIEW interchangeably for all
    subforms of those commands, and then we sort out what's really legal
    at execution time.  This allows the ALTER SEQUENCE/VIEW reference pages
    to fully document all the ALTER forms available for sequences and views
    respectively, and eliminates a longstanding cause of confusion for users.
    
    The net effect is that the following forms are allowed that weren't before:
    	ALTER SEQUENCE OWNER TO
    	ALTER VIEW ALTER COLUMN SET/DROP DEFAULT
    	ALTER VIEW OWNER TO
    	ALTER VIEW SET SCHEMA
    (There's no actual functionality gain here, but formerly you had to say
    ALTER TABLE instead.)
    
    Interestingly, the grammar tables actually get smaller, probably because
    there are fewer special cases to keep track of.
    
    I did not disallow using ALTER TABLE for these operations.  Perhaps we
    should, but there's a backwards-compatibility issue if we do; in fact
    it would break existing pg_dump scripts.  I did however tighten up
    ALTER SEQUENCE and ALTER VIEW to reject non-sequences and non-views
    in the new cases as well as a couple of cases where they didn't before.
    
    The patch doesn't change pg_dump to use the new syntaxes, either.
    a0b012a1
tablecmds.c 223 KB