DROP CONSTRAINT should be able to drop your pkey and as long as your
data supports your new key... you should be set
Gavin
Michael Hannon wrote:
> Greetings. We're running Postgres 7.3 on an Intel linux box (Redhat
> Enterprise server, version 3.0). We find ourselves in an awkward
> position: we have a database of attributes relating to students that
> uses as its primary key the ID number of the student. This is awkward
> for the following reasons.
>
> Our university used to use social-security numbers for student ID's.
> They stopped doing that a few years ago, but didn't force the change
> on existing students. Recently they've made a forced, retroactive
> change such that ALL students, past and present, now have a student ID
> that's not related to social-security number.
>
> I think this a well-justified change, but, unfortunately for us, it
> makes many of the primary keys in our database invalid. This problem
> is compounded by the fact that the programmer that set up our Postgres
> databases has moved on to another job.
>
> Our current programmer would like to start from scratch, redefine the
> schema, rebuild the database, etc. Unfortunately, there are a number
> of high-profile applications that depend on the database, and many of
> them would surely get broken by this kind of transition.
>
> We expect that we WILL eventually rebuild the database, but right now
> we're looking for a quick fix. Our current programmer tells me that
> he can't find a way to simply change the primary key "in place" in
> Postgres.
>
> Is there a way to do this?
>
> Thanks.
>
> - Mike
