• Home

  • Custom Ecommerce
  • Application Development
  • Database Consulting
  • Cloud Hosting
  • Systems Integration
  • Legacy Business Systems
  • Security & Compliance
  • GIS

  • Expertise

  • About Us
  • Our Team
  • Clients
  • Blog
  • Careers

  • VisionPort

  • Contact
  • Our Blog

    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    PostgreSQL tip: arbitrary serialized rows

    David Christensen

    By David Christensen
    March 8, 2010

    Sometimes when using PostgreSQL, you want to deal with a record in its serialized form. If you’re dealing with a specific table, you can accomplish this using the table name itself:

    psql # CREATE TABLE foo (bar text, baz int);
    CREATE TABLE
    
    psql # INSERT INTO foo VALUES ('test 1', 1), ('test 2', 2);
    INSERT 0 2
    
    psql # SELECT foo FROM foo;
         foo      
    --------------
     ("test 1",1)
     ("test 2",2)
    (2 rows)
    

    This works fine for defined tables, but how to go about this for arbitrary SELECTs? The answer is simple: wrap in a subselect and alias as so:

    psql # SELECT q FROM (SELECT 1, 2) q;
       q   
    -------
     (1,2)
    (1 row)
    

    postgres tips


    Comments