Re: [RFC] Removing "magic" oids

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

-- 
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com