Re: Column reordering in pg_dump

"hernan gonzalez" <hgonzalez@gmail.com> writes:
> I've added an option to pg_dump to reorder
> columns in the ouput "CREATE TABLE" dump.

This doesn't seem like a particularly good idea to me.  In the first
place, pg_dump is a tool for reproducing your database, not altering it,
so it seems like basically the wrong place to be inserting this type of
feature.  (There's been some talk of a Postgres ETL tool, which would be
the right place, but so far it's only talk :-(.)  In the second place,
column order is actually a pretty delicate affair when you start to
think about table inheritance situations and tables that have been
altered via ADD/DROP COLUMN.  We had bugs in pg_dump in the past with
its ability to deal with column order in such cases.  So I'm not nearly
as optimistic as you are that such a feature is incapable of causing
problems.
        regards, tom lane