Re: Alternatives to a unique indexes with NULL - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Andreas Kretschmer
Subject Re: Alternatives to a unique indexes with NULL
Date
Msg-id 20150117130334.GA10036@tux
Whole thread Raw
In response to Alternatives to a unique indexes with NULL  (Peter Hicks <peter.hicks@poggs.co.uk>)
Responses Re: Alternatives to a unique indexes with NULL  (Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>)
Re: Alternatives to a unique indexes with NULL  (Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>)
List pgsql-general
Peter Hicks <peter.hicks@poggs.co.uk> wrote:

> All,
>
> I have a Rails application on 9.3 in which I want to enforce a unique
> index on a set of fields, one of which includes a NULL-able column.
>
> According to
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/indexes-unique.html, btree
> indexes can't handle uniqueness on NULL columns, so I'm looking for
> another way to achieve what I need.


somethink like that? :

test=# create table peter_hicks (id int);
CREATE TABLE
Time: 1,129 ms
test=*# create unique index idx_1 on peter_hicks ((case when id is null
then 'NULL' else '' end)) where id is null;
CREATE INDEX
Time: 14,803 ms
test=*# insert into peter_hicks values (1);
INSERT 0 1
Time: 0,385 ms
test=*# insert into peter_hicks values (2);
INSERT 0 1
Time: 0,145 ms
test=*# insert into peter_hicks values (null);
INSERT 0 1
Time: 0,355 ms
test=*# insert into peter_hicks values (null);
ERROR:  duplicate key value violates unique constraint "idx_1"
DETAIL:  Key ((
CASE
    WHEN id IS NULL THEN 'NULL'::text
    ELSE ''::text
END))=(NULL) already exists.
Time: 0,376 ms
test=*#


Andreas
--
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unintentional side effect.                              (Linus Torvalds)
"If I was god, I would recompile penguin with --enable-fly."   (unknown)
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