If you’re getting an error that reads something like “START value (0) cannot be less than MINVALUE (1)” in PostgreSQL when you’re trying to create a sequence, it’s because your sequence’s start value is lower than its minimum value, when it should be at least the same or higher.

To fix this issue, be sure that the sequence’s start value is at least the same or greater than the minimum value.

Example of Error

Here’s an example of code that produces the error:

CREATE SEQUENCE Sequence1
    MINVALUE 1
    START 0;

Result:

ERROR:  START value (0) cannot be less than MINVALUE (1)

Here, my START value is 0 but my MINVALUE is 1, which is higher than the start value, and so an error occurred.

Solution

To fix this issue, we can either increase the start value, decrease the minimum value, or do both.

Here’s an example of increasing the START value:

CREATE SEQUENCE Sequence1
    MINVALUE 1
    START 1;

Result:

Commands completed successfully

In this case I increased the START value by one, so that it’s the same value as MINVALUE. The code ran without error, and my client told me that the command completed successfully.

Alternatively, we could have reduced the MINVALUE value. Or we could have done both – increased the START while decreasing the MINVALUE value.