Renaming Multiple Columns in One Statement with Postgresql

Renaming multiple columns in one statement with PostgreSQL

No.

While other actions can be combined, that's not possible with RENAME. The manual:

All the forms of ALTER TABLE that act on a single table, except
RENAME, SET SCHEMA, ATTACH PARTITION, and DETACH PARTITION can be
combined into a list of multiple alterations to be applied together.

Since RENAME is a tiny operation on a system catalog, there is no harm in running multiple statements. Do it in a single transaction to minimize locking overhead and avoid race conditions with intermediate states (which are then invisible to all other transactions).

Other actions like ALTER COLUMN ... SET TYPE are potentially expensive because they may have to rewrite the whole table. With big tables it would be wise to do as much as possible in a single statement.

Renaming multiple columns in PostgreSQL

There's no single command aproach. Obviously you could type multiple comands for RENAME by your self, but let me intoduce some improvement:) As I said in this answer

...for all such bulk-admin-operations you could use PostgreSQL system tables to generate queries for you instead of writing them by hand

In your case it would be:

SELECT
    'ALTER TABLE ' || tab_name || ' RENAME COLUMN '
    || quote_ident(column_name) || ' TO '
    || quote_ident( '_1' || column_name) || ';'
FROM (
    SELECT
        quote_ident(table_schema) || '.' || quote_ident(table_name) as tab_name,
        column_name
    FROM information_schema.columns  
    WHERE 
            table_schema = 'schema_name'
            AND table_name = 'table_name'
            AND column_name LIKE '\_%'
) sub;

That'll give you set of strings which are SQL commands like:

ALTER TABLE  schema_name.table_name RENAME COLUMN "_settingA" TO "_1_settingA";
ALTER TABLE  schema_name.table_name RENAME COLUMN "_settingB" TO "_1_settingB";
...

There no need using table_schema in WHERE clause if your table is in public schema. Also remember using function quote_ident() -- read my original answer for more explanation.

Edit:

I've change my query so now it works for all columns with name begining with underscore _. Because underscore is special character in SQL pattern matching, we must escape it (using \) to acctually find it.

Alter Multiple column Name and Data Type in PostgreSQL in one query

While you can change the data type of several columns in one ALTER TABLE statement, renaming a column can only be done one at a time. So you will have to use several ALTER TABLE statements.

I would recommend to run all statements in a single transaction, that way you have to acquire the ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock only once.

Postgres pgAdmin multiple column renames at once

You can write a query to fetch the column name and then to format and run a command using the results. It makes use of psql \gexec parameter.

SELECT format('ALTER TABLE footballer RENAME COLUMN %I to %I', column_name, substring(column_name,length('footballer_')+1))
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_schema = 'public'
  AND table_name   = 'footballer'
  AND column_name like 'footballer_%';\gexec  

How to rename two columns inside a single transaction in PostgreSQL?

Just do it. Start a transaction, do what you want, end the transaction.

begin;
alter table foo rename name to old_name;                         
alter table foo rename new_name TO name;
commit;

PostgreSQL query to rename and change column type with single query

In PostgreSQL, ALTER TABLE can take a series of operations. So:

ALTER TABLE <tablename> RENAME <oldcolumn> TO <newcolumn>;
ALTER TABLE <tablename> ALTER COLUMN <columnname> TYPE <newtype>;

is the same as

ALTER TABLE <tablename> 
  ALTER COLUMN <columnname> TYPE <newtype>
  RENAME <oldcolumn> TO <newcolumn>;

However... why? IIRC the rename won't cause a full-table scan, so there's no benefit over just doing the two statements separately, within one transaction. What problem are you actually trying to solve with this?

Syntax error while using multiple rename RENAME expressions postgresql

You need to use multiple ALTER statements:

ALTER TABLE table_name
RENAME COLUMN old_col_a TO new_col_a;

ALTER TABLE table_name
RENAME COLUMN old_col_b TO new_col_b;

ALTER TABLE

All the forms of ALTER TABLE that act on a single table, except RENAME, SET SCHEMA, ATTACH PARTITION, and DETACH PARTITION can be combined into a list of multiple alterations to be applied together. For example, it is possible to add several columns and/or alter the type of several columns in a single command. This is particularly useful with large tables, since only one pass over the table need be made.

Rename all columns from all tables with specific column name in PostgreSQL?

If you have superuser privileges you can make the changes in one sweep in the system catalogs:

UPDATE pg_attribute
SET attname = 'location_name'
WHERE attname = 'location';

---

Related Topics