I have a requirement where I need to find the referenced table name (Primary key table name) by a particular field in a table (Foreign key table) using this field name, table name (where this field resides) and the schema name (where the table and thereby the field resides)
For example:
Schema1.TableA
Id (Integer, PK)
Name varchar
Schema2.TableB
Id (integer, PK)
A_Id (integer, FK referencing TableA.Id)
Name varchar
I need to pass A_Id
, TableB
and Schema2
to a function and get Schema1.TableA
as result.
I am using Postgres 8.3.
If you don't need this to be portable to another RDBMS it is much faster and simpler to use the catalog tables in pg_catalog
instead of the standard information schema:
SELECT c.confrelid::regclass::text AS referenced_table
, c.conname AS fk_name
, pg_get_constraintdef(c.oid) AS fk_definition
FROM pg_attribute a
JOIN pg_constraint c ON (c.conrelid, c.conkey[1]) = (a.attrelid, a.attnum)
WHERE a.attrelid = '"Schema2"."TableB"'::regclass -- table name
AND a.attname = 'A_Id' -- column name
AND c.contype = 'f'
ORDER BY conrelid::regclass::text, contype DESC;
Returns:
referenced_table | fk_name | fk_definition
------------------+-------------------------+----------------------------------------------
Schema1.TableA | b1_fkey | FOREIGN KEY ("B_id") REFERENCES "Schema1"."TableA"("A_id")
Notes
The additional two columns are for orientation only. According to your Q, you only need the first column.
This returns all referenced tables by all foreign keys involving the given column name - including FK constraints on multiple columns.
The name is automatically schema-qualified or not according to the visibility set by the current search_path
. The name is also escaped where needed (illegal or upper case characters, reserved words, ...) automatically, too.
Check out details of pg_constraint
and pg_attribute
in the manual. And more about object identifier types as well.
Related:
- PostgreSQL drop constraint with unknown name
- Retrieving all PK and FK