Re: BETWEEN Node & DROP COLUMN

Tom Lane wrote:
> Rod Taylor <rbt(at)zort(dot)ca> writes:
> >> We could change pg_attribute to another name, and create a view called
> >> pg_attribute that never returned isdropped columns to the client. That
> >> would allow clients to work cleanly, and the server to work cleanly.
>
> > Another case where having an informational schema would eliminate the
> > whole argument -- as the clients wouldn't need to touch the system
> > tables.
>
> This is a long-term solution, not a near-term one. I suspect it's
> really unlikely that pg_dump, pgAdmin, etc will ever want to switch
> over to the SQL-standard informational schema, because they will want
> to be able to look at Postgres-specific features that are not reflected
> in the standardized schema. Certainly there will be no movement in
> that direction until the informational schema is complete; a first-cut
> implementation won't attract any interest at all :-(
>
> I thought about the idea of a backward-compatible pg_attribute view,
> but I don't see any efficient way to generate the consecutively-numbered
> attnum column in a view; anyone?

No, we can't, and because our client coders want consecutive, it is a
dead idea. Even if we could do it, we would be feeding clients attno
values that are inaccurate, causing problems when attno is joined to
other tables.

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