> Have you read the documentation for the creation of functions? And > looked at the examples? > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/plpgsql.html Obviously not as good I should have. I missed the begin and the end, adding those solved the problem. I am new to Postgres and it is quite differently designed compared to what I have been using so far, I just thought I could step right into it and do as I used to. Wrong. Even minor things like the need for ; at the end of the statements can be annoying until you find out what is the key. Reminds me of the old days of switching from Basic to Pascal and C. > In the latest release, in beta, you can DROP IF EXISTS. However, most > people just execute the drop and ignore the error, less risk of race > conditions. I am using 8.1.5, which doesn't have IF EXISTS yet. Although, this is a good addition to the language. How do I ignore the error? The problem is that I would like to have a set of drop/create statements executed at once and one drop failing will abort the script execution. That is why I was searching for some conditional execution statement within the query. Did you mean using begin/exception for this or were you just talking about one-statement-per-query execution and "forgetting" about any possible exceptions? Since you showed me how to properly use functions, it is not that hard to make a function now that checks whether the table exists or not (which I will probably do). Nonetheless, can you use PL/PgSQL without building functions? This is what I have been used to while using other SQL implementations. Not related to the above problem - if a function can be built, then it can accept the catalog, schema and table name and check whether the table really exists using information_schema.tables. Just wondering, though, is this something that Postgres is not designed for or am I missing something that disallows me to run PL/PgSQL statements within "normal" queries? As I read through the documentation, I saw something like "PL/PgSQL is installed automatically". Documentation seems huge (Postgres is itself a huge system), though, I didn't have so much time to go through the whole process. I am sure it is worth, but not when you only need it to test something (which is the case here). Thank you both for the help about this, it really matters to me!
