Re: full featured alter table?

At 12:33 15.06.2003, Nigel J. Andrews said:
--------------------[snip]--------------------
>Well, on the basis that column ordering is presentation issue it does
>belong in
>the frontend. However, as Tom pointed out this discussion was had a few
>months. I can't remember the outcome but apparently a suggestion was to have a
>column in pg_attribute giving the presentational order.
--------------------[snip]--------------------

Holdit.

This whole thread eveolves to something asking a car designer to design a
car in a way a particular color would come best...

I believe column ordering should be decided by the database itself, to
maximize output/throughput or otherwise beneficially influent performance
and/or disk usage. If you want a specific column sequence, put it into the
SELECT statement. '*' just means "gimme all of them", not in a particular
order.

If some frontende decides to display the columns in a particular order, ok,
but it should store this order somewhere else, either in its own private
tables, a configuration or ini file, or elsewhere. It simply doesn't belong
to the database layout, or pg_attribute.

Just my 2c,

--
   >O     Ernest E. Vogelsinger
   (\)    ICQ #13394035
    ^     http://www.vogelsinger.at/