On 7/18/05, Andrus <eetasoft@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > That's a lot of overhead for doing something very simple, like defining a > > department key that means ALL and a row in the foreign table for it to > > point to. Maintaining indices is a nontrivial performance trade-off. > > Yes, adding department ALL may be simpler solution. > However, I reference department table from many other tables. In those other > tables, department ALL is NOT ALLOWED. > > If I add ALL to department table, I must restrict all other tables of having > ALL department. This is a big work and cannot be done nicely in Postgres. Not true. :) You simply need to add CHECK (departament_id <> 0) (assuming 0 is the ID of ALL departaments. You can even CREATE DOMAIN with this check "built in" to save you some typing. :) If, for some reason, you want to be sure that 'ALL deparaments' is not visible, you can create a view which will SELECT WHERE departament <> 0; Basically -- I think you should get some pre-declared values, like departament_id of 0 and simply restrict it where it is not allowed. It's better than forcing NULL to become a value. :) Regards, Dawid ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly