Re: Mass Import/Generate PKs - Mailing list pgsql-general

I've tested it, and the SERIAL type populates the column when you add it

On Sat, 2004-11-06 at 18:56, Ed L. wrote:

On Saturday November 6 2004 2:13, Franco Bruno Borghesi wrote:
> the simplest way to do it seems to be adding a SERIAL column to your
> table, and then adding a primary key constraint:
>
> 1)insert data into table
> 2)ALTER TABLE <table> ADD id SERIAL;
> 3)ALTER TABLE <table> ADD CONSTRAINT <table>_pk PRIMARY KEY (id);

You may also need to populate the id column with unique values in between 
these two steps with something like "
	update table set id = nextval('table_id_seq'::text) where id isnull"

I don't think SERIAL does that for you.

Ed