From: "Albe Laurenz" <laurenz.albe@wien.gv.at>
In a way, it is similar to using the "data type" serial. The column will be
displayed as "integer", and the information that it was a serial can
only be inferred from the DEFAULT value.
It seems that this is working fine and does not cause many problems,
so I don't see why things should be different here.
Yes, I agree with you in that serial being a synonym is almost no problem.
But that's because serial is not an SQL-standard data type but a type unique
to PostgreSQL.
On the other hand, nchar is an established data type in the SQL standard. I
think most people will expect to get "nchar" as output from psql \d and
pg_dump as they specified in DDL. If they get "char" as output for "nchar"
columns from pg_dump, wouldn't they get in trouble if they want to import
schema/data from PostgreSQL to other database products? The documentation
for pg_dump says that pg_dump pays attention to easing migrating to other
DBMSs. I like this idea and want to respect this.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/app-pgdump.html
--------------------------------------------------
Script files can be used to reconstruct the database even on other machines
and other architectures; with some modifications, even on other SQL database
products.
...
--use-set-session-authorization
Output SQL-standard SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION commands instead of ALTER
OWNER commands to determine object ownership. This makes the dump more
standards-compatible, ...
--------------------------------------------------
Regards
MauMau