q&a   

Though it is a rare occurrence, we have had occasions where we need to purge ALL data from a table. Our preferred is the TRUNCATE TABLE approach because it's orders of magnitude faster than the DELETE FROM construct. You however can't use TRUNCATE TABLE unqualified, if the table you are truncating has foreign key references from other tables. In comes its extended form, the TRUNCATE TABLE .. CASCADE construct which was introduced in PostgreSQL 8.2, which will not only delete all data from the main table, but will CASCADE to all the referenced tables.

One of the neat little features that arrived at PostgreSQL 9.4 is the WITH ORDINALITY ANSI-SQL construct. What this construct does is to tack an additional column called ordinality as an additional column when you use a set returning function in the FROM part of an SQL Statement.