Postgres manually alter sequence

Question

I\'m trying to set a sequence to a specific value.

SELECT setval(\'payments_id_seq\'), 21, true

This gives an error:

Answer 1

This syntax isn't valid in any version of PostgreSQL:

ALTER SEQUENCE payments_id_seq LASTVALUE 22

This would work:

ALTER SEQUENCE payments_id_seq RESTART WITH 22;

and is equivalent to:

SELECT setval('payments_id_seq', 22, FALSE);

More in the current manual for ALTER SEQUENCE and sequence functions.

Note that setval() expects either (regclass, bigint) or (regclass, bigint, boolean). In the above example I am providing untyped literals. That works too. But if you feed typed variables to the function you may need explicit type casts to satisfy function type resolution. Like:

SELECT setval(my_text_variable::regclass, my_other_variable::bigint, FALSE);

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For repeated operations you might be interested in:

ALTER SEQUENCE payments_id_seq START WITH 22; -- set default
ALTER SEQUENCE payments_id_seq RESTART;       -- without value

START [WITH] stores a default RESTART number, which is used for subsequent RESTART calls without value. You need Postgres 8.4 or later for the last part.