Question

I have a table with existing data. Is there a way to add a primary key without deleting and re-creating the table?

Answer 1

(Updated – Thanks to the people who commented)

Modern Versions of PostgreSQL

Suppose you have a table named test1, to which you want to add an auto-incrementing, primary-key id (surrogate) column. The following command should be sufficient in recent versions of PostgreSQL:

   ALTER TABLE test1 ADD COLUMN id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY;

Older Versions of PostgreSQL

In old versions of PostgreSQL (prior to 8.x?) you had to do all the dirty work. The following sequence of commands should do the trick:

  ALTER TABLE test1 ADD COLUMN id INTEGER;
  CREATE SEQUENCE test_id_seq OWNED BY test1.id;
  ALTER TABLE test1 ALTER COLUMN id SET DEFAULT nextval('test_id_seq');
  UPDATE test1 SET id = nextval('test_id_seq');

Again, in recent versions of Postgres this is roughly equivalent to the single command above.