Re: procpid?

Jim Nasby wrote:
> On Jun 13, 2011, at 10:56 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> > If we were going to make changes like this, I'd suggest we save them
> > up in a big bag for when we change major version number. Everybody in
> > the world thinks that PostgreSQL v8 is compatible across all versions
> > (8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4), and it will be same with v9. That way we
> > would still have forward progress, but in more sensible sized steps.
> > Otherwise we just break the code annually for all the people that
> > support us. If we had a more stable environment for tools vendors,
> > maybe people wouldn't need to be manually typing procpid anyway...
> 
> Wouldn't it be better still to have both the new and old columns
> available for a while? That would produce the minimum amount of
> disruption to tools, etc. The only downside is some potential confusion,
> but that would just serve to drive people to the documentation to see
> why there were two fields, where they would find out one was deprecated.

Well, someone doing SELECT *, which is probably 90% of the users, are
going to be pretty confused by duplicate columns, asking, "What is the
difference"?  For those people this would make things worse than they
are now.

I would say 90% of users are doing SELECT *, and 10% are joining to
other tables or displaying specific columns.  We want to help that 10%
without making that 90% confused.

-- Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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