Re: RFC: Restructuring pg_aggregate

Hiroshi Inoue wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > Hiroshi's "DROP_COLUMN_HACK" was essentially along this line, but
> > I think he made a representational mistake by trying to change the
> > attnums of dropped columns to be negative values.
>
> Negative attnums had 2 advantages then. It had a big
> advantage that initdb isn't needed. Note that it was
> only a trial hack and there was no consensus on the way.
> It was very easy to change the implementation to use
> attisdropped. OTOH physical/logical attnums approach
> needed the change on pg_class, pg_attribute and so
> I've never had a chance to open the patch to public.
> It was also more sensitive about oversights of needed
> changes than the attisdropped flag approach.
>
> > That means that
> > a lot of low-level places *do* need to know about the dropped-column
> > convention, else they can't make any sense of tuple layouts.
>
> Why ? As you already mentioned, there were not that many places
> to be changed.
>
> Well what's changed since then ?

Here is an old email from me that outlines the idea of having a
physical/logical attribute numbering system, and the advantages. For
implementation, I thought we could do most of the work by filtering what
the client saw, and let the server just worry about physical numbering,
except for 'SELECT *' expansion.

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