Re: Enforce primary key on every table during dev? - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Tim Cross
Subject Re: Enforce primary key on every table during dev?
Date
Msg-id 87vaegq0v4.fsf@gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Enforce primary key on every table during dev?  (Jeremy Finzel <finzelj@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Enforce primary key on every table during dev?  (Melvin Davidson <melvin6925@gmail.com>)
Re: Enforce primary key on every table during dev?  ("btober@computer.org" <btober@broadstripe.net>)
List pgsql-general
Jeremy Finzel <finzelj@gmail.com> writes:

> We want to enforce a policy, partly just to protect those who might forget,
> for every table in a particular schema to have a primary key.  This can't
> be done with event triggers as far as I can see, because it is quite
> legitimate to do:
>
> BEGIN;
> CREATE TABLE foo (id int);
> ALTER TABLE foo ADD PRIMARY KEY (id);
> COMMIT;
>
> It would be nice to have some kind of "deferrable event trigger" or some
> way to enforce that no transaction commits which added a table without a
> primary key.
>

I think you would be better off having an automated report which alerts
you to tables lacking a primary key and deal with that policy through
other means. Using triggers in this way often leads to unexpected
behaviour and difficult to identify bugs. The policy is a management
policy and probably should be dealt with via management channels rather
than technical ones. Besides, the likely outcome will be your developers
will just adopt the practice of adding a serial column to every table,
which in itself doesn't really add any value.

Tim


-- 
Tim Cross


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