Greetings, * Robert Haas (robertmh...@gmail.com) wrote: > On Sun, Oct 14, 2018 at 6:43 PM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > > I'm not sure we want that however - yes, the short time pain will be > > lower, but do we really want to inflict the confusion about invisible > > oids on our users for the next 20 years? I think there's a fair argument > > to be made that we should cause pain once, rather continuing to inflict > > lower doeses of pain. > > Yeah, I think that argument has quite a bit of merit. I suspect that > there are a lot of people who expect that 'SELECT * FROM pg_whatever' > is going to show them all of the data in pg_whatever, and take a while > to figure out that it really doesn't. I know better and still mess > this up with some regularity. Anyone who finds it unintuitive that * > doesn't really mean everything is going to be happier with this change > in the long run. > > In the short run, it is indeed possible that some catalog queries will > break. But, really, how many? For the most part, automated queries > written by tools probably select specific columns rather than > everything, and IIUC those won't break. And even if they do use > 'SELECT *', won't they just end up with two copies of the OID column? > That might work fine. > > Of course it might not, and then you'd have to fix your code, but it's > not obvious to me that this would be a horror show.
I tend to agree that this won't be as much of a horror show as made out to be up-thread. Tools should certainly be using explicit column names and if they aren't then we're breaking them regularly anyway whenever we change what columns exist in a given catalog table. All the column renaming we did for v10 strikes me as a much bigger deal than this change and while we did hear some complaints about that, I certainly feel like it was worth it and that people generally understood. Thanks! Stephen
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
