Re: [HACKERS] Happy column dropping

On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Don Baccus wrote:

> At 09:48 PM 1/24/00 -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
> >Maybe that is true.  Having phantom column all over the code is going to
> >be a mess, and hardly worth it considering how many developers there are
> >and how many _big_ items still have to be done.
> 
> Works for Oracle...I guess Postgres is just an obviously more robust,
> faster, more reliable, and altogether more brilliant RDBMS than this
> loser commercial DB?  It's really hard to understand why Postgres has
> had such a poor reputation over the years when faced with such facts,
> isn't it?

Woah ... pull back here ... I haven't got a *clue* where this response
came from, but, from what I can tell, it was *totally* uncalled
for.  Oracle makes how many *millions* of dollars a year to sink into
programmers dedicated to it?  We have how many developers in comparison,
who don't get paid and who work on things they feel is important ... and,
there are alot bigger items on the TODO list ...

If we had unlimited (or near so) monetary resourses, fine, but we don't,
we have alot of volunteers who spend alot of *personal* time advancing
this project ... we are *not* trying to compete directly with Oracle, we
are trying to create a product that ppl *trust* and can *rely* on
... Bruce's comment above about "going to be a mess", to me, interpretes
as "there has gotta be a cleaner way of doing it that we haven't come up
with yet" ... 

> >Messing up code for one feature is rarely worth it.
> 
> Dropping constraints on a table just because you drop a column is
> just butt-ugly.
> 
> Sorry if you disagree.

And yes, I do agree here ... I like the solution that one person presented
that had it so that you couldn't drop the column unless as constraints and
requirements were removed first ...

Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org