Re: Doc patch to note which system catalogs have oids

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
>> I think this is fundamentally wrong, or at least misleading, because it
>> documents OID as if it were an ordinary column.  Somebody who did
>> "select * from pg_class" and didn't see any "oid" in the result would
>> think the docs were wrong.
>
> Given that it's been quite some time since we defaulted to including
> OIDs in tables, and the high level of confusion that individuals trying
> to join pg_class and pg_namespace together go through due to select *
> not including the oid column, I wonder if perhaps we should consider
> changing that.  Might be possible to do for just the catalog tables (to
> minimize the risk of breaking poorly-written applications), or provide
> a GUC to control including the oid column in select *.
>
>> It's possible that it's worth expending a boilerplate paragraph in each
>> of those pages to say "this catalog has OIDs" (or that it doesn't).
>> But this isn't the way.
>
> I'm afraid I disagree with this.  The oid column, in the system
> catalog, is user-facing and I like having it included as a column in the
> table in the docs, so users know what to use when doing joins.

+1.

-- 
Robert Haas
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