Re: BETWEEN Node & DROP COLUMN

Rod Taylor <rbt@zort.ca> writes:
>> We could change pg_attribute to another name, and create a view called
>> pg_attribute that never returned isdropped columns to the client.  That
>> would allow clients to work cleanly, and the server to work cleanly.

> Another case where having an informational schema would eliminate the
> whole argument -- as the clients wouldn't need to touch the system
> tables.

This is a long-term solution, not a near-term one.  I suspect it's
really unlikely that pg_dump, pgAdmin, etc will ever want to switch
over to the SQL-standard informational schema, because they will want
to be able to look at Postgres-specific features that are not reflected
in the standardized schema.  Certainly there will be no movement in
that direction until the informational schema is complete; a first-cut
implementation won't attract any interest at all :-(

I thought about the idea of a backward-compatible pg_attribute view,
but I don't see any efficient way to generate the consecutively-numbered
attnum column in a view; anyone?
        regards, tom lane