Re: standard IDENTITY support (Was: Re: SERIAL type not autoincremented) - Mailing list pgsql-admin

On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 01:42:35 +0200,
  Markus Bertheau <twanger@bluetwanger.de> wrote:
> ?? ??????, 02.07.2004, ?? 19:22, teknet@poczta.onet.pl ??????????:
> > Hello
> > i have:
> > create table student(
> > id                      SERIAL NOT NULL,
> > name               VARCHAR(35) NOT NULL,
> > primary key (id)
> > );
> >
> > and when i try to insert like this:
> > insert into student (name) values('me');
> > i receive error:
> > ERROR:  duplicate key violates unique constraint "student_pkey"
>
> Is this scenario possible in standard SQL identity columns? From what I
> read here[1], a standard IDENTITY column can guarantee successful
> insertion of a unique key. Is there similar support planned for
> PostgreSQL?

I don't expect things are going to change. However it isn't a problem
if you always use DEFAULT to generate the value to be inserted and
that you use bigserial if you need more than 2 billion (2^31) values.