On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 09:11, Hiroshi Inoue wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> > From my perspective, when client coders like Dave Page and others say
> > they would prefer the flag to the negative attno's, I don't have to
> > understand. I just take their word for it.
>
> do they really love to check attisdropped everywhere ?
> Isn't it the opposite of the encapsulation ?
> I don't understand why we would do nothing for clients.
AFAIK, there is separate work being done on defining SQL99 compatible
system views, that most client apps could and should use.
But those (few) apps that still need intimate knowledge about postrges'
internals will always have to query the original system _tables_.
Also, as we have nothing like Oracles ROWNR, I think it will be quite
hard to have colnums without gaps in the system views, so we could
perhaps have a stopgap solution of adding logical column numbers (
(pg_attribute.attlognum) that will be changed every time a col is
added/dropped just for that purpose.
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Hannu