Skip to main content

Updating unique columns

Greg Mullane has an excellent post on updating unique columns. A simple problem, but one that can be troublesome in practice:
[T]here is one circumstance when [unique constraints] can be a real pain: swapping the values of the rows. In other words, a transaction in which the column values start unique, and end unique, but may not be so in the middle.
Read his article -- I wouldn't have thought of his "reversing the polarity" method. Clever! But my first thought when I read this was, "Aha, Greg missed one." Surely the easiest way is to simply create a deferrable constraint (where you can elect to have the constraint only checked at the end of the transaction, instead of at the end of each statement)! So I gave it a try:
=> CREATE TABLE foo (
     i              int
         CONSTRAINT foo_pk PRIMARY KEY DEFERRABLE
   );

ERROR:  misplaced DEFERRABLE clause
At first I thought this indicated a syntax error, but my syntax was correct. After some googling, it turns out that this is the rather unhelpful message that means, as the docs explain,
Only foreign key constraints currently accept this clause. All other constraint types are not deferrable.
Huh. Sure enough, all the places I'd used DEFERRABLE in the past were with FK constraints, so I never noticed this limitation. (Fixing this is on the TODO list for future action.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...

Troubleshooting the ps3 wireless network connection, including error 80130128

My father got a ps3 for Christmas, but ran into some problems getting it on his wireless network. The first one was "connection error 80130128" after configuring it to use DHCP. I couldn't google anything useful about this; just a few other hapless victims asking if anyone had any ideas. Fortunately Dad had his laptop there too and noticed Windows complaining that two machines on the network were both using the same IP. So, over the phone, I walked him through setting up the ps3 with a static address: on his laptop, run -> cmd ipconfig Read the "gateway" ip. Put that into his browser to go to his router's admin page Find the DHCP settings for his router to see what range of IPs it hands out; pick one outside that range Set up the ps3 with that IP, the router IP as primary dns, and an opendns server as secondary This made the connection test happy. But when he tried to go to the playstation store, it gave a DNS error. If he repeated the connection te...