Here's Tom Lane's response to my original post on pgsql-sql:
> This seems to have considerable overlap with the problem of indexing
> inheritance hierarchies (so that constraints on tables with children
> would work as people expect). It may be that it's sufficient to solve
> it for inheritance cases, and not try to support the generic case of
> constraints applied across arbitrary sets of tables. ISTM that the
> latter could introduce a bunch of extra definitional and practical
> issues beyond what you'd have to solve to do the former.
>
> You're discussing it on the wrong list though --- try -hackers.
Hadn't thought of distributed keys being related to inheritance, though
now I can see how one might apply inheritance to the situations I
mentioned above. Is this what you were thinking, Tom?
Case 1:
employees (id, name)
schools (name, location)
teachers (id, name, school_name)where (id, name) inherits from employees and school_name references
schools(name)
subs (id, name) inherits from employees
managers (id, name, school_name)where (id, name) inherits from employees and school_name references
schools(name)
Case 3
comments (comment_id, comment)
employees(id, name)
comments_nonemployees (comment_id, comment, name)where (id, comment) inherits from comments
comments_employees (comment_id, comment, employee_id)where (comment_id,comment) inherits from comments, employee_id
references employees(id)
I don't know very much about inheritance in PostgreSQL, so I'm doing a
bit of reading via Google. If anyone has recommendations on good
sources re: inheritance in PostgreSQL, I'd be thankful.
Regards,
Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com