On 14.03.24 15:03, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2024-Mar-14, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>
>> Perhaps it would make sense if we change the ALTER TABLE command to be like
>>
>> ALTER TABLE t1 ADD IF NOT EXISTS NOT NULL c1
>>
>> Then the behavior is like one would expect.
>>
>> For ALTER TABLE, we would reject this command if IF NOT EXISTS is not
>> specified. (Since this is mainly for pg_dump, it doesn't really matter for
>> usability.) For ALTER DOMAIN, we could accept both variants.
>
> I don't understand why you want to change this behavior, though.
Because in the abstract, the behavior of
ALTER TABLE t1 ADD <constraint specification>
should be to add a constraint.
In the current implementation, the behavior is different for different
constraint types.