Oids vs Serial fields (was Re: [GENERAL] searching oid's)

Adriaan Joubert wrote:
>
> Yes oids get dumped with the -o flag. That is why I said automatically. Fact
> remains that you cannot manipulate oids. Should you ever want to copy a table into
> an exisiting system you would have to do a new initdb to make sure that the oids
> in your table are not in use. And if anything ever gets corrupted it is much
> harder to recover and fix it, as you have no control over the oid values that the
> system assigns. I would definitely recommend a separate serial value, and I
> believe this is also what is recommended in the postgres docs.

You make some good points, but where is this recommended in the docs?  I'd like
to see more of "serial vs oid" if there is something.

Bruce's book doesn't recommend one over the other, though it does mention some
oid limitations.  It doesn't mention that the sequence for a serial value isn't
dropped when its table is, btw.

I'd be interested in what others have to say on this topic.

--Rick