Recreating a Postgres table with all cascading relations transferred

Question

I'm trying to optimize the structure of a table. To do so, I've put the columns in the most optimal order possible and then ran this query (simplified):

INSERT INTO table_new ("id", "some_field", "some_other_field") SELECT "id", "some_field", "some_other_field" FROM table_current;

Then I simply rename the table and add all the same indexes and foreign keys.

ALTER TABLE "table_current" RENAME TO "table_old";
ALTER TABLE "table_new" RENAME TO "table_current";
ALTER TABLE "table_current" ADD PRIMARY KEY ("id") NOT DEFERRABLE INITIALLY IMMEDIATE;

This has worked great in the past, but in this particular case, there are a LOT of other tables with cascading foreign keys on this table.

So if I recreate and rename, then all the other tables still reference table_old in their foreign keys instead of the new table_current.

How do I do such a table migration like this without having to recreate the foreign keys on every other table as well?

Answer 1

There is no easy way to work around the problem. When you drop columns that other things are referencing, like views or foreign keys, you must manually inform all areas of the schema that have dependencies on that column.

There is no shortcut that I know of around this. No one really makes a habit of reordering tables. Most of the requests are for cosmetic reasons, however if you're really doing it for a valid reason (like table packing) then I wish you the best of luck.

It's been a feature request for a while, and it comes up frequently.