On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Neil Conway wrote: > I'd like to add a new column to pg_attribute that specifies the > attribute's "logical position" within its relation. The idea here is > to separate the logical order of the columns in a relation from the > on-disk storage of the relation's tuples. This allows us to easily & > quickly change column order, add an additional column before or after > an existing column, etc.
That sounds excellent! > (a) ISTM this should also apply to COPY TO and COPY FROM if the user > didn't supply a column list. Is this reasonable? It would break > dumps of the table's contents, but then again, dumps aren't > guaranteed to remain valid over arbitrary changes to the table's > meta-data. You're just saying it'd break old dumps, right? I'd assume COPY FROM would use attpos ordering when writing out columns, or that every user-visible interaction with the table pretends the columns are in attpos order. So dumps would break no more or less than when adding or dropping a column currently, right? Jon ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html