Re: Reordering the fields in a table

If it helps the cause, I would love this too, in addition to having the
ability to ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN with the ability to specify where in
the column order. This ends up being a bigger frustration for a lot of
people than it should be, and maybe it's a touch of OCD, but most RDBMS
packages allow this, and it would be awesome if we could have it in
Postgres. Would just love to keep my created_at and modified_at columns at
the end of tables without dropping and re-adding them.

Love you guys!

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 3:25 PM Rui DeSousa <rui(at)crazybean(dot)net> wrote:

> You can use a views instead of the application using the tables directly.
> The order of the columns can quickly change in a view by dropping and
> recreating it with the desired order.
>
>
> On Apr 16, 2021, at 12:15 PM, Campbell, Lance <lance(at)illinois(dot)edu> wrote:
>
> If there is a way to do this please let me know.
>
> *PostgreSQL Request*
> I would love to see an enhancement to PostgreSQL where administrators had
> some way to reorder the fields in their tables. As a software developer I
> can easily write a tool to reorder the fields in a table if there were no
> foreign keys. But foreign keys throw an enormous hurdle in my way.
>
> *Why is this a big deal?*
> Sixteen years ago when I started working at the University of Illinois I
> told my boss, “if you give me thirty days I can build a platform that will
> allow me to cut at least 50% off of the development time of your standard
> internal web business app.” I built it. Today I personally
> created/manage/develop 17 services that provide over 120 million pages of
> web content a year. I can jump into this infrastructure and make a change
> in an hour or two that would take most people weeks to change. The one
> issue that causes me the most grief is the readability of tables. When you
> manage 17 services where you are continually tweaking the system you find
> the tables are very unreadable. New fields are continually added to the
> bottom of tables. They are just not readable.
>
> The most underappreciated elements in software design is the ongoing need
> to be able to easily read what you are working with. Table can really
> become a mess. It would be the most amazing enhancement to be able to
> order the fields of any table with a command. I know today this is
> probably not a top priority to most developers and DBAs. They work in an
> environment where one person might work on just one or two services. But
> as development strategies change over time more people will be developing
> software faster and faster. Table field readability will become more
> important.
>
> Thanks,
>
> *LANCE CAMPBELL <https://directory.illinois.edu/person/lance>*
> *Software Architect*
>
> Web Services <https://webtools.illinois.edu/>
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> Contact the Webtools Team <https://go.illinois.edu/contactUs>
> 217.333.0382
> lance(at)illinois(dot)edu
>
>
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>
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> record and may be subject to public disclosure.*
>
>
>

--
Wells Oliver
wells(dot)oliver(at)gmail(dot)com <wellsoliver(at)gmail(dot)com>