> If it's not there, no one will ever miss it. You might as well argue
> that there should be a way of creating a foreign key reference by
> ALTER'ing the referenced table instead of the referencing table.
> Sure, if the SQL committee was into symmetry, they might have provided
> such a thing. But they didn't and no one misses it.
That's a very different situation, since the relationship is not
symmetrical, and it would take far more than a single keyword. Analogy
fail.
And one of the reasons people don't miss it is because far too many
users don't use FKs in the first place. ;-( The only reason why users
wouldn't notice the absence of AFTER (or, more likely, try it and then
ask on IRC for error message diagnosis) is because they're not using the
feature. (In which case it doesn't matter how it operates)
Docs which say "Add new enums BEFORE the enum you want to add them to,
and if you need to add an enum at the end, then add it without the
BEFORE keyword" is unnecessarily confusing to users. Saying "Add new
enum values using the BEFORE or AFTER keyword before or after the
appropriate value" is vastly easier to understand.
I really don't see the value in making a command substantially less
intuitive in order to avoid a single keyword, unless it affects areas of
Postgres outside of this particular command.
-- -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com