Contents

• variant
• Current Status
• Building
  • Dependencies
  • Copyright and License

variant

variant is a Postgres datatype that can hold data from any other type, as well as remembering what the original type was. For example:

SELECT 'some text'::text::variant.variant;
      variant       
--------------------
 (text,"some text")
(1 row)

SELECT 42::int::variant.variant;
   variant    
--------------
 (integer,42)
(1 row)

To build it, just do this:

make install

and then in your database:

CREATE EXTENSION variant;

See "Building" below for more details or if you run into a problem.

Current Status

You can see the current status of released versions of this extension on PGXN-tester.

Travis-CI status:

Building

To build variant, do this:

make
make install

If you encounter an error such as:

"Makefile", line 8: Need an operator

You need to use GNU make, which may well be installed on your system as gmake:

gmake
gmake install

If you encounter an error such as:

make: pg_config: Command not found

Be sure that you have pg_config installed and in your path. If you used a package management system such as RPM to install PostgreSQL, be sure that the -devel package is also installed. If necessary tell the build process where to find it:

env PG_CONFIG=/path/to/pg_config make && make install

And finally, if all that fails (and if you're on PostgreSQL 8.1 or lower, it likely will), copy the entire distribution directory to the contrib/ subdirectory of the PostgreSQL source tree and try it there without pg_config:

env NO_PGXS=1 make && make installcheck && make install

If you encounter an error such as:

ERROR:  must be owner of database regression

You need to run the test suite using a super user, such as the default "postgres" super user:

make installcheck PGUSER=postgres

Once variant is installed, you can add it to a database. If you're running PostgreSQL 9.1.0 or greater, it's a simple as connecting to a database as a super user and running:

CREATE EXTENSION variant;

If you've upgraded your cluster to PostgreSQL 9.1 and already had variant installed, you can upgrade it to a properly packaged extension with:

CREATE EXTENSION variant FROM unpackaged;

For versions of PostgreSQL less than 9.1.0, you'll need to run the installation script:

psql -d mydb -f /path/to/pgsql/share/contrib/variant.sql

If you want to install variant and all of its supporting objects into a specific schema, use the PGOPTIONS environment variable to specify the schema, like so:

PGOPTIONS=--search_path=extensions psql -d mydb -f variant.sql

Dependencies

The variant data type has no dependencies other than PostgreSQL.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2014 Jim Nasby, Blue Treble Consulting http://BlueTreble.com