Re: Fast AT ADD COLUMN with DEFAULTs

On 10/5/16, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> On 2016-10-05 11:58:33 -0700, Serge Rielau wrote:
>> Dear Hackers,
>> I’m working on a patch that expands PG’s ability to add columns to a table
>> without a table rewrite (i.e. at O(1) cost) from the
>> nullable-without-default to a more general case.
> If I understand this proposal correctly, altering a column default will
> still have trigger a rewrite unless there's previous default?
No, "a second “exist default"" was mentioned, i.e. it is an additional
column in a system table (pg_attribute) as default column values of
the "pre-alter" era. It solves changing of the default expression of
the same column later.