Robert Treat wrote:
> On Saturday 04 August 2007 09:45, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>
>> Rohit Khare wrote:
>>
>>> Seeing the history of PostgreSQL development, following features are
>>> expected in pgAdmin:
>>>
>>> (1) Facility to insert a column in between other columns during table
>>> design.
>>>
>> This I can see how people like, actually. Theorists claim it's not
>> needed since column order really doesn't matter, but during development
>> things will just "look nicer". So I can agree with this.
>>
>
> We've gotten requests like this at times for phppgadmin, and I think our
> standard mantra has evolved into "re-implementing core database features in
> the gui client tends to cause nasty surprises for our users". We actually
> have some experience with this, since we used to implement alter table drop
> column before it lived in postgresql, and we often had users complaining of
> the limitations it had and the things that broke when they used it.
>
> Looking at the OP's problem, the basic idea would be to create a new table and
> then do some renaming hackery, adding the new column while pulling
> information from the old table, but you run into all sorts of problems with
> dependent objects when you do it that way. *shrug* Thats not news to people
> who have studied it, thoough most people don't seem to grasp what is going on
> in the system as a whole.
>
>
I think everyone agrees that this particular item is indeed something
that should be done in core, almost everyone agrees that it should be
done, and almost all of those agree with an implementation suggestion
put forward by Tom Lane. So what we need is someone to actually do it
;-) I will be mildly surprised if it's not done for 8.4.
cheers
andrew