Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute?

On Monday 21 February 2005 04:23, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> > I'm wondering how useful it is to store explicit representations of the
> > system attributes in pg_attribute. We could very easily hard-wire those
> > things instead, which would make for a large reduction in the number of
> > entries in pg_attribute. (In the current regression database nearly
> > half of the rows have attnum < 0.) I think the impact on the backend
> > would be pretty minimal, but I'm wondering if removing these entries
> > would be likely to break any client-side code. Does anyone know of
> > client code that actually pays attention to pg_attribute rows with
> > negative attnums?
>
> Well, apart from a "attnum > 0" clause in phpPgAdmin, I don't think so...
>

Well, the corner case would be for those times when we use oid for updating
specific rows in a table, if a user creates there own oid column then you
could have trouble. Actually we already have a safegaurd for this in
phppgadmin so we wont cause mistakes, it's just that those updates probably
won't work... others might not have been so thorough though.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL