Re: Effect of dropping a partitioned table's column over time

Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> Since partitioned tables have no storage themselves, is there
> any technical reason we couldn't remove a partitioned table's dropped
> pg_attribute so that its TupleDesc matches partitions created later?

You'd break views referring to the partitioned table, or at least to
any columns after the dropped one.

There's been talk of separating column identity (think OID) from column
logical and physical positions. If we did that, and had Vars using the
column identity number while tupdescs were sorted according to physical
position, then what you're thinking of could be made to work. But a
couple of people have attacked that problem and been unable to finish
it :-(

regards, tom lane