Question

I have a sqlite table that was originally created with:

PRIMARY KEY (`column`);

I now need to remove that primary key and create a new one. Creating a new one is easy, but removing the original seems to be the hard part. If I do

.indices  tablename

I don’t get the primary key. Some programs show the primary key as

Indexes: 1
    [] PRIMARY

The index name is typically in the [].

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can’t.

PRAGMA INDEX_LIST('MyTable');

will give you a list of indices. This will include the automatically generated index for the primary key which will be called something like 'sqlite_autoindex_MyTable_1'.

But unfortunately you cannot drop this index…

sqlite> drop index sqlite_autoindex_MyTable_1;
SQL error: index associated with UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY constraint cannot be dropped

All you can do is re-create the table without the primary key.