Re: Odd behavior with domains

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 11:00 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Well, it's not specifically related to domains -- it's related to the
> fact that pg_catalog objects mask the domain you created in the public
> schema, because pg_catalog is by default in front of all other schemas
> unless you explicitely put it elsewhere.

Well, what's causing the apparent weirdness here is the fact that
pg_catalog, despite being implicitly at the front of the namespath
path, doesn't become the default creation schema as an
explicitly-named schema would.  So you don't try to create things
there but anything that already exists there masks the stuff you do
create.  And I think it's fair to say that's pretty weird to someone
who is unfamiliar with the way the system works.

We could do something like this:

NOTICE: existing type "pg_catalog"."text" will mask new type "public"."text"

We could even make that an ERROR by default, as long as we had some
GUC to disable the behavior for pg_dump.  How often do you really
intentionally create an object that shadows an existing system object?

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company