Question :
In Postgres 9.4, I’m trying to pull the names of all columns that are involved in a UNIQUE
constraint for a given table in Postgres.
It looks like the names of such columns are contained in pg_constraint
. According to the docs, the column relevant to my problem is called conkey
, which happens to be an array of int
s.
The point is, the query I’ve come up with gives me the wrong results, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m joining on conkey
in the wrong way. The query is as follows:
SELECT
pg_attribute.attname,
pg_constraint.*
FROM
pg_attribute
INNER JOIN pg_constraint
ON pg_attribute.attnum = ANY (pg_constraint.conkey)
WHERE pg_constraint.conrelid = (
SELECT
oid
FROM
pg_class
WHERE
relname LIKE 'test_table'
)
AND pg_constraint.contype = 'u'; -- to filter out non-unique constraints
Here’s a table DDL for a quick repro:
CREATE TABLE "test_table" (
"date" date DEFAULT now() NOT NULL,
"foo" varchar COLLATE "default" NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT "test_table_foo_key" UNIQUE ("foo")
)
WITH (OIDS=FALSE);
ALTER TABLE "test_table" OWNER TO "postgres";
Now, can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong? Is there an easier way to get the information I want altogether?
I’m trying to retrieve the names of constrained table because the app I’m writing needs to work around the current lack of UPSERT
in Postgres. The idea is to do the insert-or-update with a CTE, but since I don’t know what the constrained columns are beforehand, I need to do this bit of introspection.
Answer :
You half miss the connection between the two tables. The ...relid
columns must match, too:
SELECT attname, c.*
FROM pg_attribute a
JOIN pg_constraint c
ON attrelid = conrelid -- this was missing
AND attnum = ANY (conkey)
WHERE attrelid = 'test_table'::regclass;