Hi everyone,
I'm new to databases and PostgreSQL in particular. Currently, I'm
playing around with some test DBs, which already contain some valuable
data.
My question: How can I evolve databases (ie deleting columns,
adding/changing/removing constraints, etc)?
I tried using pg_dump and editing the dump file. While reading the dump
file helped me to understand how I could do it, the editing of the data
was quite cumbersome.
I also know about ALTER, but there seems to be no way to delete columns.
Which means that I'd have to create a new table, populate it, but what
do I do with other tables that used the original table as FOREIGN KEYS?
These kinds of problems make me suspect that there are other ways of
evolving tables.
I was just wondering how other users of PostgreSQL solve this problem.
What are good recipes to evolve databases?
Any hints welcome! Thanks,
--
Chris Stork (PhD student at UC Irvine) http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cstork/
OpenPGP fingerprint: B08B 602C C806 C492 D069 021E 41F3 8C8D 50F9 CA2F
