currval Function in PostgreSQL complaining that "column does not exist"

Question

I am trying to use PostgreSQL's currval function to return the last inserted row id of a table called Concept. Concept has a serial primary key called cid and there was an automatically generated Sequence called Concept_cid_seq.

I try the following statement and get an error:

SELECT currval("Concept_cid_seq");
ERROR:  column "Concept_cid_seq" does not exist
LINE 1: SELECT currval("Concept_cid_seq");
                       ^

********** Error **********

ERROR: column "Concept_cid_seq" does not exist
SQL state: 42703
Character: 16

But when I run the query :

SELECT * from "Concept_cid_seq";

I get a table with one row (as I'd expect) showing columns like last_value, start_value, etc...

What am I missing here? Am I passing the wrong information to currval? Why does it say the 'column does not exist?'

Answer 1

It turns out that this was an issue with capitalization and quotes. Because I wanted to preserve the capitalization of the relation name I needed to use both single and double quotes in order to pass the correct relation name to currval.

I changed the query to SELECT currval('"Concept_cid_seq"'); (note the outer single quotes) and it worked correctly.