Re: postgres_fdw and defaults

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> I know we've discussed this before, but I have just had the unpleasant 
> experience of trying to get around the difficulty of inserting into a 
> foreign table with a serial field, surely a common enough scenario that 
> we should try to deal with it better. The solution of using a local 
> sequence really doesn't work, as there might be multiple users of the 
> table, as there will be in my scenario. I opted instead to get a value 
> from the foreign sequence explicitly before inserting, but that's pretty 
> ugly. So I am wondering (without having looked at all closely at it) if 
> we could set an option to tell the FDW that we want the foreign default 
> to be used instead of a local one. Is the difficulty that we don't know 
> if a value has been explicitly supplied or not? Maybe we could have some 
> magic value that we could use instead ('foreign_default'?). I'm just 
> throwing out ideas here, but this is really a wart that could well do 
> with attention.

I'm not awake enough to recall the previous discussions of remote
default-value insertion in any detail, but they were extensive, and
no one has proposed solutions to the problems we hit.  Please consult
the archives.
        regards, tom lane