When you want to change a view in Postgres, for instance to add an extra field, it can happen that the view is used elsewhere (perhaps in another view) and that it can't be changed. Instead, the depending views first have to be dropped. This can easily cascade, and you might even end up having to drop all views and recreate them. This is a lot of tricky work and very error prone.
I've come up with a bare bones way around this, and basically comes down to:
- dump the database
- change the view definition in the SQL file
- drop the database
- recreate the database from the altered SQL file
This might sound draconic, but it is trivial to do and not error prone at all. The only downside is that the database in unavailable for a small amount of time. In our case this was not a problem.
Establish what needs to be changed
Dump the database to an SQL file, and create a copy too:
pg_dump terena > terena.sql cp terena.sql backup.sql
- Now edit the SQL file, by locating the view definition, and change it to what it should be.
Create a database patch from the changes:
diff -Nru backup.sql terena.sql > terena.diff
An example of such a patch, that add an extra field to the vw_events view:
--- terenaNU.sql 2012-08-20 12:52:47.000000000 +0200 +++ terena2.sql 2012-08-20 12:58:39.000000000 +0200 @@ -1935,7 +1935,7 @@ -- CREATE VIEW vw_events AS - SELECT event_status.status, event_types.name AS event_type, events.event_id, events.gcal_event_id, events.owner_email, events.event_type_id, events.name, events.description, events.starts, events.ends, date_part('day'::text, events.starts) AS start_day, date_part('month'::text, events.starts) AS start_month, date_part('year'::text, events.starts) AS start_year, date_part('day'::text, events.ends) AS end_day, date_part('month'::text, events.ends) AS end_month, date_part('year'::text, events.ends) AS end_year, events.venue_name, events.address, events.city, events.country, events.country_code, events.project_url, events.direct_link, events.agenda_url, events.show, events.show_homepage, events.event_status_id, events.reg_deadline, events.capacity, events.customfield1_label, events.inserted, events.modified, events.group_id FROM ((event_types JOIN events ON ((event_types.event_type_id = events.event_type_id))) JOIN event_status ON ((events.event_status_id = event_status.event_status_id)));