Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: > * Tom Lane (t...@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote: >> You can't have it both ways. Either you throw an error if the name's >> not there, or you don't.
> I'm not following why we couldn't handle a dropped column differently. Different from what? A name-based lookup isn't going to find a dropped column, because its attname has been replaced with "........pg.dropped.N........" > Dropped tables don't hang around in the catalog long after they've been > dropped. If you are talking about the case where a lookup by attnum finds a dropped column, that does return null already, cf column_privilege_check(). But I don't see a way for a name-based lookup to do the same without losing all semblance of error detection. regards, tom lane