CREATE TABLE

CREATE TABLE defines a table that is persisted in durable storage and can be written to, updated and seamlessly joined with other tables, views or sources.

Tables in Materialize are similar to tables in standard relational databases: they consist of rows and columns where the columns are fixed when the table is created but rows can be added to at will via INSERT statements.

WARNING! At the moment, tables serve a niche use case. They lack some features that are standard in relational databases. In most situations, you should use sources instead.

Syntax

`col_option`

Field	Use
TEMP / TEMPORARY	Mark the table as temporary.
table_name	A name for the table.
col_name	The name of the column to be created in the table.
col_type	The data type of the column indicated by col_name.
NOT NULL	Do not allow the column to contain NULL values. Columns without this constraint can contain NULL values.
default_expr	A default value to use for the column in an `INSERT` statement if an explicit value is not provided. If not specified, `NULL` is assumed.

Details

Restrictions

Additionally, tables do not currently support:

Primary keys
Unique constraints
Check constraints
Insert statements that refer to data in other relations, e.g.:
```
INSERT INTO t1 SELECT * FROM t2
```
UPDATE ... and DELETE statements

Temporary tables

The TEMP/TEMPORARY keyword creates a temporary table. Temporary tables are automatically dropped at the end of the SQL session and are not visible to other connections. They are always created in the special mz_temp schema.

Temporary tables may depend upon other temporary database objects, but non-temporary tables may not depend on temporary objects.

Examples

Creating a table

You can create a table t with the following statement:

CREATE TABLE t (a int, b text NOT NULL);

Once a table is created, you can inspect the table with various SHOW commands.

SHOW TABLES;
TABLES
------
t

SHOW COLUMNS IN t;
name       nullable  type
-------------------------
a          true      int4
b          false     text