Re: [HACKERS] Inheritance, referential integrity and other constraints

On Wed, Jan 26, 2000 at 07:34:29PM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 2000-01-25, Chris Bitmead mentioned:
> 
> > As long as you're working on this area you could fix the problem where
> > if you do ALTER table* ADD COLUMN ... pg_dump no longer works because
> > the column orders have changed in different inherited tables.
> 
> This should be fixed in pg_dump then. As I see it, ALTER table* ADD COLUMN
> does exactly the right thing.

No, the problem is that right now, the order of columns in a child table
depends on the exact history of how all the columns got into each table.
Ideally, we want to be able to describe all the tables without reference
to history, only to (meta)content.  The exact order of columns in a table
really isn't much use to users, in any case (even though it is visible,
technically.  This had got to be a backward compatability feature of
the original SQL, isn't it?)

Ross
-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005