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Indexes can also be used to enforce uniqueness of a column's value, or the uniqueness of the combined values of more than one column.
CREATE UNIQUE INDEXname
ONtable
(column
[, ...]);
Currently, only B-tree indexes can be declared unique.
When an index is declared unique, multiple table rows with equal indexed values are not allowed. Null values are not considered equal. A multicolumn unique index will only reject cases where all indexed columns are equal in multiple rows.
PostgreSQL automatically creates a unique index when a unique constraint or primary key is defined for a table. The index covers the columns that make up the primary key or unique constraint (a multicolumn index, if appropriate), and is the mechanism that enforces the constraint.
There's no need to manually create indexes on unique columns; doing so would just duplicate the automatically-created index.
Indexes can also be used to enforce uniqueness of a column's value, or the uniqueness of the combined values of more than one column.
CREATE UNIQUE INDEXname
ONtable
(column
[, ...]);
Currently, only B-tree indexes can be declared unique.
When an index is declared unique, multiple table rows with equal indexed values are not allowed. Null values are not considered equal. A multicolumn unique index will only reject cases where all indexed columns are equal in multiple rows.
PostgreSQL automatically creates a unique index when a unique constraint or primary key is defined for a table. The index covers the columns that make up the primary key or unique constraint (a multicolumn index, if appropriate), and is the mechanism that enforces the constraint.
There's no need to manually create indexes on unique columns; doing so would just duplicate the automatically-created index.
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER — remove a foreign-data wrapper
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER [ IF EXISTS ] name
[, ...] [ CASCADE | RESTRICT ]
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER
removes an existing foreign-data wrapper. To execute this command, the current user must be the owner of the foreign-data wrapper.
IF EXISTS
Do not throw an error if the foreign-data wrapper does not exist. A notice is issued in this case.
name
The name of an existing foreign-data wrapper.
CASCADE
Automatically drop objects that depend on the foreign-data wrapper (such as foreign tables and servers), and in turn all objects that depend on those objects (see Section 5.14).
RESTRICT
Refuse to drop the foreign-data wrapper if any objects depend on it. This is the default.
Drop the foreign-data wrapper
dbi
:
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER dbi;
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER
conforms to ISO/IEC 9075-9 (SQL/MED). The
IF EXISTS
clause is a
PostgreSQL
extension.
CREATE RULE — define a new rewrite rule
CREATE [ OR REPLACE ] RULEname
AS ONevent
TOtable_name
[ WHEREcondition
] DO [ ALSO | INSTEAD ] { NOTHING |command
| (command
;command
... ) } whereevent
can be one of: SELECT | INSERT | UPDATE | DELETE
CREATE RULE
defines a new rule applying to a specified table or view.
CREATE OR REPLACE RULE
will either create a new rule, or replace an existing rule of the same name for the same table.
The
PostgreSQL
rule system allows one to define an alternative action to be performed on insertions, updates, or deletions in database tables. Roughly speaking, a rule causes additional commands to be executed when a given command on a given table is executed. Alternatively, an
INSTEAD
rule can replace a given command by another, or cause a command not to be executed at all. Rules are used to implement SQL views as well. It is important to realize that a rule is really a command transformation mechanism, or command macro. The transformation happens before the execution of the command starts. If you actually want an operation that fires independently for each physical row, you probably want to use a trigger, not a rule. More information about the rules system is in Chapter 41.
Presently,
ON SELECT
rules must be unconditional
INSTEAD
rules and must have actions that consist of a single
SELECT
command. Thus, an
ON SELECT
rule effectively turns the table into a view, whose visible contents are the rows returned by the rule's
SELECT
command rather than whatever had been stored in the table (if anything). It is considered better style to write a
CREATE VIEW
command than to create a real table and define an
ON SELECT
rule for it.
You can create the illusion of an updatable view by defining
ON INSERT
,
ON UPDATE
, and
ON DELETE
rules (or any subset of those that's sufficient for your purposes) to replace update actions on the view with appropriate updates on other tables. If you want to support
INSERT RETURNING
and so on, then be sure to put a suitable
RETURNING
clause into each of these rules.
There is a catch if you try to use conditional rules for complex view updates: there
must
be an unconditional
INSTEAD
rule for each action you wish to allow on the view. If the rule is conditional, or is not
INSTEAD
, then the system will still reject attempts to perform the update action, because it thinks it might end up trying to perform the action on the dummy table of the view in some cases. If you want to handle all the useful cases in conditional rules, add an unconditional
DO INSTEAD NOTHING
rule to ensure that the system understands it will never be called on to update the dummy table. Then make the conditional rules non-
INSTEAD
; in the cases where they are applied, they add to the default
INSTEAD NOTHING
action. (This method does not currently work to support
RETURNING
queries, however.)
A view that is simple enough to be automatically updatable (see CREATE VIEW ) does not require a user-created rule in order to be updatable. While you can create an explicit rule anyway, the automatic update transformation will generally outperform an explicit rule.
Another alternative worth considering is to use
INSTEAD OF
triggers (see
CREATE TRIGGER
) in place of rules.
name
The name of a rule to create. This must be distinct from the name of any other rule for the same table. Multiple rules on the same table and same event type are applied in alphabetical name order.
event
The event is one of
SELECT
,
INSERT
,
UPDATE
, or
DELETE
. Note that an
INSERT
containing an
ON CONFLICT
clause cannot be used on tables that have either
INSERT
or
UPDATE
rules. Consider using an updatable view instead.
table_name
The name (optionally schema-qualified) of the table or view the rule applies to.
condition
Any
SQL
conditional expression (returning
boolean
). The condition expression cannot refer to any tables except
NEW
and
OLD
, and cannot contain aggregate functions.
INSTEAD
INSTEAD
indicates that the commands should be executed
instead of
the original command.
ALSO
ALSO
indicates that the commands should be executed
in addition to
the original command.
If neither
ALSO
nor
INSTEAD
is specified,
ALSO
is the default.
command
The command or commands that make up the rule action. Valid commands are
SELECT
,
INSERT
,
UPDATE
,
DELETE
, or
NOTIFY
.
Within
condition
and
command
, the special table names
NEW
and
OLD
can be used to refer to values in the referenced table.
NEW
is valid in
ON INSERT
and
ON UPDATE
rules to refer to the new row being inserted or updated.
OLD
is valid in
ON UPDATE
and
ON DELETE
rules to refer to the existing row being updated or deleted.
You must be the owner of a table to create or change rules for it.
In a rule for
INSERT
,
UPDATE
, or
DELETE
on a view, you can add a
RETURNING
clause that emits the view's columns. This clause will be used to compute the outputs if the rule is triggered by an
INSERT RETURNING
,
UPDATE RETURNING
, or
DELETE RETURNING
command respectively. When the rule is triggered by a command without
RETURNING
, the rule's
RETURNING
clause will be ignored. The current implementation allows only unconditional
INSTEAD
rules to contain
RETURNING
; furthermore there can be at most one
RETURNING
clause among all the rules for the same event. (This ensures that there is only one candidate
RETURNING
clause to be used to compute the results.)
RETURNING
queries on the view will be rejected if there is no
RETURNING
clause in any available rule.
It is very important to take care to avoid circular rules. For example, though each of the following two rule definitions are accepted by
PostgreSQL
, the
SELECT
command would cause
PostgreSQL
to report an error because of recursive expansion of a rule:
CREATE RULE "_RETURN" AS ON SELECT TO t1 DO INSTEAD SELECT * FROM t2; CREATE RULE "_RETURN" AS ON SELECT TO t2 DO INSTEAD SELECT * FROM t1; SELECT * FROM t1;
Presently, if a rule action contains a
NOTIFY
command, the
NOTIFY
command will be executed unconditionally, that is, the
NOTIFY
will be issued even if there are not any rows that the rule should apply to. For example, in:
CREATE RULE notify_me AS ON UPDATE TO mytable DO ALSO NOTIFY mytable; UPDATE mytable SET name = 'foo' WHERE id = 42;
one
NOTIFY
event will be sent during the
UPDATE
, whether or not there are any rows that match the condition
id = 42
. This is an implementation restriction that might be fixed in future releases.
CREATE RULE
is a
PostgreSQL
language extension, as is the entire query rewrite system.
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER — remove a foreign-data wrapper
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER [ IF EXISTS ] name
[, ...] [ CASCADE | RESTRICT ]
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER
removes an existing foreign-data wrapper. To execute this command, the current user must be the owner of the foreign-data wrapper.
IF EXISTS
Do not throw an error if the foreign-data wrapper does not exist. A notice is issued in this case.
name
The name of an existing foreign-data wrapper.
CASCADE
Automatically drop objects that depend on the foreign-data wrapper (such as foreign tables and servers), and in turn all objects that depend on those objects (see Section 5.14).
RESTRICT
Refuse to drop the foreign-data wrapper if any objects depend on it. This is the default.
Drop the foreign-data wrapper
dbi
:
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER dbi;
DROP FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER
conforms to ISO/IEC 9075-9 (SQL/MED). The
IF EXISTS
clause is a
PostgreSQL
extension.
The process of retrieving or the command to retrieve data from a database is called a
query
. In SQL the
SELECT
command is used to specify queries. The general syntax of the
SELECT
command is
[WITHwith_queries
] SELECTselect_list
FROMtable_expression
[sort_specification
]
The following sections describe the details of the select list, the table expression, and the sort specification.
WITH
queries are treated last since they are an advanced feature.
A simple kind of query has the form:
SELECT * FROM table1;
Assuming that there is a table called
table1
, this command would retrieve all rows and all user-defined columns from
table1
. (The method of retrieval depends on the client application. For example, the
psql
program will display an ASCII-art table on the screen, while client libraries will offer functions to extract individual values from the query result.) The select list specification
*
means all columns that the table expression happens to provide. A select list can also select a subset of the available columns or make calculations using the columns. For example, if
table1
has columns named
a
,
b
, and
c
(and perhaps others) you can make the following query:
SELECT a, b + c FROM table1;
(assuming that
b
and
c
are of a numerical data type). See Section 7.3 for more details.
FROM table1
is a simple kind of table expression: it reads just one table. In general, table expressions can be complex constructs of base tables, joins, and subqueries. But you can also omit the table expression entirely and use the
SELECT
command as a calculator:
SELECT 3 * 4;
This is more useful if the expressions in the select list return varying results. For example, you could call a function this way:
SELECT random();
The process of retrieving or the command to retrieve data from a database is called a
query
. In SQL the
SELECT
command is used to specify queries. The general syntax of the
SELECT
command is
[WITHwith_queries
] SELECTselect_list
FROMtable_expression
[sort_specification
]
The following sections describe the details of the select list, the table expression, and the sort specification.
WITH
queries are treated last since they are an advanced feature.
A simple kind of query has the form:
SELECT * FROM table1;
Assuming that there is a table called
table1
, this command would retrieve all rows and all user-defined columns from
table1
. (The method of retrieval depends on the client application. For example, the
psql
program will display an ASCII-art table on the screen, while client libraries will offer functions to extract individual values from the query result.) The select list specification
*
means all columns that the table expression happens to provide. A select list can also select a subset of the available columns or make calculations using the columns. For example, if
table1
has columns named
a
,
b
, and
c
(and perhaps others) you can make the following query:
SELECT a, b + c FROM table1;
(assuming that
b
and
c
are of a numerical data type). See Section 7.3 for more details.
FROM table1
is a simple kind of table expression: it reads just one table. In general, table expressions can be complex constructs of base tables, joins, and subqueries. But you can also omit the table expression entirely and use the
SELECT
command as a calculator:
SELECT 3 * 4;
This is more useful if the expressions in the select list return varying results. For example, you could call a function this way:
SELECT random();
The configuration variable jit determines whether JIT compilation is enabled or disabled. If it is enabled, the configuration variables jit_above_cost, jit_inline_above_cost, and jit_optimize_above_cost determine whether JIT compilation is performed for a query, and how much effort is spent doing so.
jit_provider determines which JIT implementation is used. It is rarely required to be changed. See Section 32.4.2.
For development and debugging purposes a few additional configuration parameters exist, as described in Section 20.17.
The configuration variable jit determines whether JIT compilation is enabled or disabled. If it is enabled, the configuration variables jit_above_cost, jit_inline_above_cost, and jit_optimize_above_cost determine whether JIT compilation is performed for a query, and how much effort is spent doing so.
jit_provider determines which JIT implementation is used. It is rarely required to be changed. See Section 32.4.2.
For development and debugging purposes a few additional configuration parameters exist, as described in Section 20.17.
DROP CAST — remove a cast
DROP CAST [ IF EXISTS ] (source_type
AStarget_type
) [ CASCADE | RESTRICT ]
DROP CAST
removes a previously defined cast.
To be able to drop a cast, you must own the source or the target data type. These are the same privileges that are required to create a cast.
IF EXISTS
Do not throw an error if the cast does not exist. A notice is issued in this case.
source_type
The name of the source data type of the cast.
target_type
The name of the target data type of the cast.
CASCADE
RESTRICT
These key words do not have any effect, since there are no dependencies on casts.
To drop the cast from type
text
to type
int
:
DROP CAST (text AS int);
The
DROP CAST
command conforms to the SQL standard.