Re: Unimpletmented features

Ross,

I am not so sure that ALTER <object> family  is used for development
purposes only...

Consider data warehousing where typically each day the administrator
would :

1    Extract data from source database(s) - usually in ascii file
format, as these dbs may be connection unfriendly, not controlled by us
etc etc etc
2    Modify relevant tables in the target database and disable all
constraints ( primary keys too usually )
3    Drop all remaining indexes
4    Bulk load the source data.
5    Enable all constraints
6    Create any remaining indexes

These tables tend to have a very large number of rows ( >100,000,000 )
and are often corrospondingly large ( >10GB ) and thus it is important
to remove indexes and constraints to load the data in a sensible time
frame ( a few hours or less).

Postgresql is good at the "star" type queries that are common in such
warehouse applications, and thus is well suited to move into that area -
but the unimplemented ALTER features hinder this

regards

Mark