Re: WIP: extensible enums

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> wrote:
> On fre, 2010-11-12 at 17:19 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
>> If we allow users to name objects, we ought to make every effort to
>> also allow renaming them.  In my mind, the only way renaming is too
>> marginal to be useful is if the feature itself is too marginal to be
>> useful.
>
> The bottom line is, any kind of database object needs to be changeable
> and removable, otherwise there will always be hesitations about its use.
> And when there are hesitations about the use, it's often easiest not to
> bother.
>
> I remember ten years ago or so we used to send people away who requested
> the ability to drop columns, claiming they didn't plan their database
> properly, or they should load it from scratch.  Nowadays that is
> ludicrous; databases live forever, development is agile, everything
> needs to be changeable.

It was ludicrous then, too.  I picked MySQL for several projects early
on for precisely the lack of the ability to drop columns in
PostgreSQL.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company