Re: 2 newbie questions

"Helen M Hudson" <helen@rttc.co.za> writes:

> 1. I'm porting a clients database over from access(!).  In order not
> to have to tamper with the code, I need to rid myself of the oid
> column.  I have a workaround which involves editing the code, but I
> was just interested if the "getting rid of the oid column" was a
> possibility?

Well, you are in luck, the 7.2 release allows you to create tables
without the oid column.  However, I am curious as to why you would
want to get rid of the oid column.  It seems to me that if you didn't
want to see the oid column then you shouldn't select it when querying
:).  The oid column doesn't show up in any of the clients I use unless
I ask for it specifically.  I also believe that their is a tab in the
ODBC driver that hides that column.  It's been a while since I played
with the odbc driver, so I am not positive.

> 2. I have a date/time column in access... should this datatype be
> datetime in postgres... and how do i format the text to import it
> into the postgres file using copy?

I am not really all that familiar with access, but my guess is that
you want the timestamp type.  The preferred format for import is ISO
format:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.mm TZ

but PostgreSQL is pretty flexible when it comes to date time input.  I
regularly import from SQL Server and I haven't ever had any problems
with timestamp fields.

> All replies humbly appreciated! :)
>
> Helen

Take Care,
Jason