Tables and Views dependencies

Let’s say you need to ALTER TABLE foo ALTER COLUMN bar TYPE bigint;, and PostgreSQL is helpfully telling you that no you can’t because such and such views depend on the column. The basic way to deal with that is to copy paste from the error message the names of the views involved, then prepare a script wherein you first DROP VIEW then ALTER TABLE and finally CREATE VIEW again, all in the same transaction.

So you have to copy paste also the view definitions. With large view definitions, it quickly gets cumbersome to do so. Well when you’re working on operations, you have to bear in mind that cumbersome is a synonym for error prone, in fact — so you want another solution if possible.

Oh, and the other drawback of this solution is that ALTER TABLE will first take a LOCK on the table, locking out any activity. And more than that, the lock acquisition will queue behind current activity on the table, which means waiting for a fairly long time and damaging the service quality on a moderately loaded server.

It’s possible to abuse the system catalogs in order to find all views that depend on a given table, too. For that, you have to play with pg_depend and you have to know that internally, a view is in fact a rewrite rule. Then here’s how to produce the two scripts that we need:

=# \t
Showing only tuples.

=# \o /tmp/drop.sql
=# select 'DROP VIEW ' || views || ';'
     from (select distinct(r.ev_class::regclass) as views
            from pg_depend d join pg_rewrite r on r.oid = d.objid 
           where refclassid = 'pg_class'::regclass
             and refobjid = 'SCHEMA.TABLENAME'::regclass
             and classid = 'pg_rewrite'::regclass 
             and pg_get_viewdef(r.ev_class, true) ~ 'COLUMN_NAME') as x;

=# \o /tmp/create.sql
=# select 'CREATE VIEW ' || views || E' AS \n'
       || pg_get_viewdef(views, true) || ';' 
     from (select distinct(r.ev_class::regclass) as views 
          from pg_depend d join pg_rewrite r on r.oid = d.objid
         where refclassid = 'pg_class'::regclass
           and refobjid = 'SCHEMA.TABLENAME'::regclass
           and classid = 'pg_rewrite'::regclass
           and pg_get_viewdef(r.ev_class, true) ~ 'COLUMN_NAME') as x;

=# \o

Replace SCHEMA.TABLENAME and COLUMN_NAME with your targets here and the first query should give you one row per candidate view. Well if you’re not using the \o trick, that is — if you do, check out the generated file instead, with \! cat /tmp/drop.sql for example.

Please note that this catalog query is not accurate, as it will select as a candidate any view that will by chance both depend on the target table and contain the column_name in its text definition. So either filter out the candidates properly (by proper proof reading then another WHERE clause), or just accept that you might DROP then CREATE again more views than need be.

If you need some more details about the \t \o sequence you might be interested in this older article about resetting sequences.