database design questions

Hello,

I'm designing a database and I'm having some problems, so I ask you a
suggestion.

1) The database I'm going to develop is a big list with a catalog of
items and I want to store subsets of this list representing the
available items in several places.

My idea is to create the big table with all the elements and then to
create another table, where each row holds a pair (id_item, id_place)
and thanks to this create several views, joining the two tables
and selecting the rows with a give id_place.

Do you think it's too heavy? Is there a simpler way to do it?

2) do you think it's possible in a plpgsql procedure select the name of
a table into a variable and use that variable in the query?

I mean, can I do something like

SELECT INTO table_name get_table_name();
SELECT * FROM table_name;

?

3) faq 4.11.1 says

> CREATE TABLE person (
> id SERIAL,
> name TEXT
> );
>
>is automatically translated into this:
>
> CREATE SEQUENCE person_id_seq;
> CREATE TABLE person (
> id INT4 NOT NULL DEFAULT nextval('person_id_seq'),
> name TEXT
> );

how can I do it with a INT8 instead of a INT4?

Thank you

--
Non c'è più forza nella normalità, c'è solo monotonia.