I just installed a fresh Postgres database. select version(); gives: "PostgreSQL 8.1.5 on i686-pc-mingw32, compiled by GCC gcc.exe (GCC) 3.4.2 (mingw-special)" Normal statements like select * from sometable work fine. I initiated the default databases, created the postgres user and I tried to run the following query: if 1 <> 1 then select 1 else select 2 end if; The error was: ERROR: syntax error at or near "if" at character 1 I added the language using 'createlang plpgsql', but this didn't help. This is similar to what I read from http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/plpgsql-control-structures.html I tried using the functions: create function izitest() returns void as 'if 1 <> 1 then select 1 else select 2 end if;' language 'plpgsql' where plpgsql is the name of the language I created. This gave the same error: ERROR: syntax error at or near "if" at character 45 Statements like this are executing normally on other database engines. I am obviously missing something, probably something specific to Postgres. I couldn't find anything on the Net or documentation itself after a few hours search that will give me a hint why this is not working. Any ideas about this? Anyway, to pose another question about this. The reason I need the above is to check whether the table exists (from information_schema.tables) and drop it only in that case (dirty exception handling). There might be a way to do it (in 8.1) in another way then using ifs to check. The other question still stands, however.
