Re: full featured alter table?

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 10:05:48AM -0400, Shane Dawalt wrote:
> Insofaras rearranging the internal table is concerned, I don't
> believe the pg people had that intent in mind at all. It may have been
> the intent of the original poster, but I think most everyone agrees that
> the back-end knows far better than us humans what is more optimal for
> table layout.

Again, yes, it would be nice if pgsql would order things most
efficiently in the back-end, but it doesn't. I don't care at all about
how stuff comes out in SELECT *. I DO care about how it's stored in the
tuple.

Much, if not most, of the work required to make this change happen would
be required to de-couple presentation from tuple ordering anyway, and
that seems to be one feature everyone agrees would be good. If the
de-coupling is going to be added, might as well add a nice feature that
won't really hurt anything at the same time.
--
Jim C. Nasby (aka Decibel!) jim(at)nasby(dot)net
Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"