Decided to read PostgreSQL 8.4 Release notes before going to sleep and was pleasantly surprised. The fact of ALTER statements mess (which I described in my post) is now fixed:

Modify the ALTER TABLE syntax to allow all reasonable combinations for tables, indexes, sequences, and views (Tom)

This change allows the following new syntaxes:

  • ALTER SEQUENCE OWNER TO
  • ALTER VIEW ALTER COLUMN SET/DROP DEFAULT
  • ALTER VIEW OWNER TO
  • ALTER VIEW SET SCHEMA

There is no actual new functionality here, but formerly you had to say ALTER TABLE to do these things, which was confusing.

Cool! Way to go!