Re: logical column ordering

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> However, there's a difference between making a query silently given
> different results, and breaking it completely forcing the user to
> re-study how to write it. I think the latter is better. In that light
> we should just drop attnum as a column name, and use something else:
> maybe (attidnum, attlognum, attphysnum). So all queries in the wild
> would be forced to be updated, but we would not silently change
> semantics instead.

Hm. I'm on board with renaming like that inside the backend, but
I'm very much less excited about forcibly breaking client queries.
I think there is little if any client-side code that will care about
either attidnum or attphysnum, so forcing people to think about it
will just create make-work.

regards, tom lane