default to WITHOUT OIDS?

Folks,

Is it a good idea for CREATE TABLE to default to WITHOUT OIDS, rather
than WITH OIDS? Naturally, this would (a) be some time in the future
(7.5, perhaps) and (b) only apply to user tables.

The two advantages I can see are:

(1) Makes the storage of most tables more efficient; while you *can*
specify WITHOUT OIDS, a lot of people won't know to, or will forget.

(2) Reduces the usage of the OID counter, making OID wraparound less
common.

The main disadvantage I can see is just backward compatibility. In order
to improve that, we could add a GUC var "use_oids_default" (or some
other name), which would control whether a CREATE TABLE defaults to WITH
or WITHOUT OIDS. In 7.4, the GUC var would default to false (so there
would be no change in behavior), but in 7.5 we could switch it to true.

Comments?

Cheers,

Neil
--
Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> || PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC