The name (optionally schema-qualified) of a type to be created.
internallength
A literal value, which specifies the internal length of
the new type.
input_function
The name of a function, created by
CREATE FUNCTION, which
converts data from its external form to the type's
internal form.
output_function
The name of a function, created by
CREATE FUNCTION, which
converts data from its internal form to a form suitable
for display.
element
The type being created is an array; this specifies
the type of the array elements.
delimiter
The delimiter character to be used between values in arrays made
of this type.
default
The default value for the data type. Usually this is omitted,
so that the default is NULL.
alignment
Storage alignment requirement of the data type. If specified, must
be char, int2,
int4, or double;
the default is int4.
storage
Storage technique for the data type. If specified, must
be plain, external,
extended, or main;
the default is plain.
column_name
The name of a column of the composite type.
data_type
The name of an existing data type.
Outputs
CREATE TYPE
Message returned if the type is successfully created.
Description
CREATE TYPE allows the user to register a new data
type with PostgreSQL for use in the current data base.
The user who defines a type becomes its owner.
If a schema name is given then the type is created in the
specified schema. Otherwise it is created in the current schema (the one
at the front of the search path; see CURRENT_SCHEMA()).
The type name must be distinct from the name of any existing type or
domain in the same schema. (Because tables have associated data types,
type names also must not conflict with table names in the same schema.)
Base Types
The first form of CREATE TYPE creates a new base type
(scalar type). It requires the
registration of two functions (using CREATE FUNCTION) before defining the
type. The representation of a new base type is determined by
input_function, which
converts the type's external representation to an internal
representation usable by the
operators and functions defined for the type. Naturally,
output_function
performs the reverse transformation. The input function may be
declared as taking one argument of type cstring,
or as taking three arguments of types
cstring, OID, int4.
(The first argument is the input text as a C string, the second
argument is the element type in case this is an array type,
and the third is the typmod of the destination column, if known.)
It should return a value of the data type itself.
The output function may be
declared as taking one argument of the new data type, or as taking
two arguments of which the second is type OID.
(The second argument is again the array element type for array types.)
The output function should return type cstring.
You should at this point be wondering how the input and output functions
can be declared to have results or inputs of the new type, when they have
to be created before the new type can be created. The answer is that the
input function must be created first, then the output function, then the
data type.
PostgreSQL will first see the name of the new
data type as the return type of the input function. It will create a
"shell" type, which is simply a placeholder entry in
pg_type, and link the input function definition to the shell
type. Similarly the output function will be linked to the (now already
existing) shell type. Finally, CREATE TYPE replaces the
shell entry with a complete type definition, and the new type can be used.
Note: In PostgreSQL versions before 7.3, it was
customary to avoid creating a shell type by replacing the functions'
forward references to the type name with the placeholder pseudo-type
OPAQUE. The cstring inputs and
results also had to be declared as OPAQUE before 7.3.
To support loading
of old dump files, CREATE TYPE will accept functions
declared using opaque, but it will issue a NOTICE and
change the function's declaration to use the correct types.
New base data types can be fixed length, in which case
internallength is a
positive integer, or variable length, indicated by setting
internallength
to VARIABLE. (Internally, this is represented
by setting typlen to -1.) The internal representation of all
variable-length types must start with an integer giving the total
length of this value of the type.
To indicate that a type is an array,
specify the type of the array
elements using the ELEMENT keyword. For example, to define
an array of 4-byte integers ("int4"), specify
ELEMENT = int4
More details about array types appear below.
To indicate the delimiter to be used between values in the external
representation of arrays of this type, delimiter can be
set to a specific character. The default delimiter is the comma
(','). Note that the delimiter is associated
with the array element type, not the array type itself.
A default value may be specified, in case a user wants columns of the
data type to default to something other than NULL.
Specify the default with the DEFAULT keyword.
(Such a default may be overridden by an explicit DEFAULT
clause attached to a particular column.)
The optional flag, PASSEDBYVALUE, indicates that
values of this data type are passed
by value rather than by reference. Note that you
may not pass by value types whose internal representation is
longer than the width of the Datum type (four bytes on
most machines, eight bytes on a few).
The alignment keyword
specifies the storage alignment required for the data type. The
allowed values equate to alignment on 1, 2, 4, or 8 byte boundaries.
Note that variable-length types must have an alignment of at least
4, since they necessarily contain an int4 as their first component.
The storage keyword
allows selection of storage strategies for variable-length data types
(only plain is allowed for fixed-length types).
plain disables TOAST for the data type: it will always
be stored in-line and not compressed.
extended gives full TOAST capability: the system will
first try to compress a long data value, and will move the value out of
the main table row if it's still too long.
external allows the value to be moved out of the main
table, but the system will not try to compress it.
main allows compression, but discourages moving the
value out of the main table. (Data items with this storage method may
still be moved out of the main table if there is no other way to make
a row fit, but they will be kept in the main table preferentially over
extended and external items.)
Composite Types
The second form of CREATE TYPE
creates a composite type.
The composite type is specified by a list of column names and data types.
This is essentially the same as the row type
of a table, but using CREATE TYPE avoids the need to
create an actual table when all that is wanted is to define a type.
A stand-alone composite type is useful as the return type of a function.
Array Types
Whenever a user-defined base data type is created,
PostgreSQL automatically creates an
associated array type, whose name consists of the base type's
name prepended with an underscore. The parser understands this
naming convention, and translates requests for columns of type
foo[] into requests for type _foo.
The implicitly-created array type is variable length and uses the
built-in input and output functions array_in and
array_out.
You might reasonably ask "why is there an ELEMENT
option, if the system makes the correct array type automatically?"
The only case where it's useful to use ELEMENT is when you are
making a fixed-length type that happens to be internally an array of N
identical things, and you want to allow the N things to be accessed
directly by subscripting, in addition to whatever operations you plan
to provide for the type as a whole. For example, type name
allows its constituent chars to be accessed this way.
A 2-D point type could allow its two component floats to be
accessed like point[0] and point[1].
Note that
this facility only works for fixed-length types whose internal form
is exactly a sequence of N identical fixed-length fields. A subscriptable
variable-length type must have the generalized internal representation
used by array_in and array_out.
For historical reasons (i.e., this is clearly wrong but it's far too
late to change it), subscripting of fixed-length array types starts from
zero, rather than from one as for variable-length arrays.
Notes
User-defined type names cannot begin with the underscore character
("_") and can only be 62
characters long (or in general NAMEDATALEN-2, rather than
the NAMEDATALEN-1 characters allowed for other names).
Type names beginning with underscore are
reserved for internally-created array type names.
Examples
This example creates the box data type and then uses the
type in a table definition:
CREATE TYPE box (INTERNALLENGTH = 16,
INPUT = my_procedure_1, OUTPUT = my_procedure_2);
CREATE TABLE myboxes (id INT4, description box);
If box's internal structure were an array of four
float4s, we might instead say
CREATE TYPE box (INTERNALLENGTH = 16,
INPUT = my_procedure_1, OUTPUT = my_procedure_2,
ELEMENT = float4);
which would allow a box value's component floats to be accessed
by subscripting. Otherwise the type behaves the same as before.
This example creates a large object type and uses it in
a table definition:
CREATE TYPE bigobj (INPUT = lo_filein, OUTPUT = lo_fileout,
INTERNALLENGTH = VARIABLE);
CREATE TABLE big_objs (id int4, obj bigobj);
This example creates a composite type and uses it in
a table function definition:
CREATE TYPE compfoo AS (f1 int, f2 text);
CREATE FUNCTION getfoo() RETURNS SETOF compfoo AS 'SELECT fooid, fooname FROM foo' LANGUAGE SQL;
Compatibility
This CREATE TYPE command is a
PostgreSQL extension. There is a
CREATE TYPE statement in SQL99 that is rather
different in detail.
