Re: CREATE TABLE LIKE and SERIAL

[Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>]

Thom Brown <thombrown(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Well I realise SERIAL is a convenience rather than a datatype in its
> own right, but I'm surprised that LIKE can't differentiate between a
> column created with integer and one created with serial.  The table
> continues to report a serial datatype after its creation.

Really?

regression=# create table foo (f1 serial);
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "foo_f1_seq" for serial column "foo.f1"
CREATE TABLE
regression=# \d foo
                         Table "public.foo"
 Column |  Type   |                    Modifiers                     
--------+---------+--------------------------------------------------
 f1     | integer | not null default nextval('foo_f1_seq'::regclass)

regression=# 

We used to try to treat serial as more like a real type (in particular
pg_dump used to try to dump the results of this using "serial") but we
found out that that was actively a bad idea, because there were too
many corner cases where it did the wrong thing.  I doubt we'll want
to go back in that direction.

			regards, tom lane