On 8/19/2004 11:47 PM, Darren wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I ran across something today when trying to use oids as primary keys. The slon 
> daemon will create SQL like this this:
>  UPDATE table_name SET field = value WHERE ; 
> 
> with no clause for the where. Of course this fails. 
> Is this just something that shouldn't be done? Or might slony be able to make 
> use of tables that use the oid as a primary key? I ask mainly because using 
> the oid is an easy way to retrofit a primary key onto existing tables in a 
> clean manner.

Using OID's as primary keys is neither clean, nor reliable. Do not get 
fooled by the fact that most of the system catalogs use OID's for their 
primary key. If you use OID's for your data primary keys, you not only 
start running through them at a higher rate, you also force yourself 
into a situation where you cannot cleanup your system even with a dump 
and restore in the case where your OID counter rolls over. And believe 
me, a rollover of the OID counter isn't funny.

A lot of special logic would be necessary to support system attributes 
as row identifiers in slony. I don't have any plans to do so.


Jan

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