Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute?

Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
>>> Does anyone know of
>>> client code that actually pays attention to pg_attribute rows with
>>> negative attnums?

> 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.

Anyone who's not checking that has been at risk ever since we invented
WITHOUT OIDS:

regression=# create table foo (oid text);
ERROR: column name "oid" conflicts with a system column name
regression=# create table foo (oid text) without oids;
CREATE TABLE

Probably ctid is the more interesting case; I'm pretty sure ODBC relies
on ctid as a short-term-unique row identifier.

regards, tom lane