Re: Beyond the 1600 columns limit on windows

On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 09:45, Tino Wildenhain wrote:
> Alex Stapleton schrieb:
> >
> > On 8 Nov 2005, at 12:50, Tino Wildenhain wrote:
> >
> >> Evandro's mailing lists (Please, don't send personal messages to this
> >> address) schrieb:
> >>
> >>> Hi guys,
> >>> I would like to know if it is possible to have more than 1600
> >>> columns on windows without recompiling postgres.
> >>>
> >>>
> >> I would like to know who on earth needs 1600 columns and even beyond?
> >> Hint: you can have practically unlimited rows in your n:m table :-)
> >>
> >
> > Well this screams random arbitrary limit to me. Why does this limit
> > exist? What ever happened to the holy 0,1,infinity triumvirate?
>
> I guess it eases implementation and there is no reason to go so high
> on columns either. The limit could even be lower w/o and hurts but
> 1600 seems skyrocket high enough (read unlimited :-)

I'd have to vote with Tino here. Why worry about an arbitrary limit you
should never really be approaching anyway. If a table has more than
several dozen columns, you've likely missed some important step of
normalization. Once you near 100 columns, something is usually horribly
wrong. I cannot imagine having a table that actually needed 1600 or
more columns.

And, Evandro, nothing is free. If someone went to the trouble of
removing the limit of 1600, we'd probably pay in some other way, most
likely with poor performance. There are other, far more important
features to work on, I'd think.