Re: RFC: Restructuring pg_aggregate

Hiroshi Inoue <Inoue(at)tpf(dot)co(dot)jp> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> 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.

There are not many places to change if the implementation uses
attisdropped, because we *only* have to hide the existence of the column
at the parser level. The guts of the system don't know anything funny
is going on; a dropped column looks the same as an undropped one
throughout the executor. But with negative attnums, even such basic
routines as heap_formtuple have to know about it, no?

regards, tom lane