Re: full featured alter table?

Ernest E Vogelsinger wrote:

> 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.

The proposal does beg the question:

Why would a default tuple-attribute order be stored in the database
but not relation-tuple order?

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com