Re: [RFC] Removing "magic" oids

Greetings,

* Thomas Munro (thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com) wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2018 at 11:35 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> > > Does anybody have engineering / architecture level comments about this
> > > proposal?
> >
> > FWIW, I'm -1 on making OIDs be not-magic for SELECT purposes.  Yeah, it's
> > a wart we wouldn't have if we designed the system today, but the wart is
> > thirty years old.  I think changing that will break so many catalog
> > queries that we'll have the villagers on the doorstep.  Most of the other
> > things you're suggesting here could be done easily without making that
> > change.
> >
> > Possibly we could make them not-magic from the storage standpoint (ie
> > they're regular columns) but have a pg_attribute flag that says not
> > to include them in "SELECT *" expansion.
> 
> FWIW there is interest in a general facility for hiding arbitrary
> attributes from SELECT * for other reasons too:
> 
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAEepm%3D3ZHh%3Dp0nEEnVbs1Dig_UShPzHUcMNAqvDQUgYgcDo-pA%40mail.gmail.com

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking to bring up also.

There's certainly also been explicit requests for the user to be able to
control what SELECT * means, beyond our own ideas of things we'd like to
be able to add and then hide.

Thanks!

Stephen