Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org> writes:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 04:28:57PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> It's really highly annoying that we can't see the contents of the
>> infomasks for the rows.
> Any particular reason there isn't an infomask system column?
(a) inertia
(b) lack of desire to add an additional pg_attribute row per table.
I recall having proposed that we stop storing explicit pg_attribute
entries for system columns, which would make this sort of change easier
to make, and would save a pretty considerable amount of space in
pg_attribute too. (In the present regression database, about 45% of the
rows in pg_attribute are for system columns; that might be overly high
for real-world DBs though.) But people were a bit worried about what
might break.
regards, tom lane