Re: [pgsql-admin] "Soft-hitting" the 1600 column limit

Thank you all for your answers.

David and Tom's answers are more than enough to feed my argument to the developers. =)

Scott, you're right of course. My first action to reestablish their development database was to do a dump/restore, but by logging DML statements I can see the application is dropping and adding the same column over and over again, so it's a matter of time before it hangs. I hope showing this thread to the developers will make them see some sense. 

@Wells, don't ask me, I have no idea, hahah, but it's a small table and the application keeps dropping/readding the column, actually. I figure the developer is using some kind of crazy ORM that drops the column when he deletes an object property and re-adds it when he sets the property back or something. 

@Ervin, a vacuum full doesn't "fix" this behavior, since it's expected after all =) 

collimittest=# \d add_drop_text 

          Table "public.add_drop_text"

 Column | Type | Collation | Nullable | Default 

--------+------+-----------+----------+---------

 fixed  | text |           |          | 

collimittest=# vacuum FULL ANALYZE VERBOSE add_drop_text ;

INFO:  vacuuming "public.add_drop_text"

INFO:  "add_drop_text": found 0 removable, 0 nonremovable row versions in 0 pages

DETAIL:  0 dead row versions cannot be removed yet.

CPU: user: 0.00 s, system: 0.00 s, elapsed: 0.00 s.

INFO:  analyzing "public.add_drop_text"

INFO:  "add_drop_text": scanned 0 of 0 pages, containing 0 live rows and 0 dead rows; 0 rows in sample, 0 estimated total rows

VACUUM

collimittest=# alter table add_drop_text add column x int;

ERROR:  tables can have at most 1600 columns

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On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 1:57 PM, Scott Ribe <scott_ribe@elevated-dev.com> wrote:

He's *NOT* doing anything that requires 1600 columns--that was pretty much the point of his post.

--
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe@elevated-dev.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottribe/

> On Jun 6, 2018, at 10:53 AM, Wells Oliver <wells.oliver@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> let's just stop for a moment and talk about what you're doing that requires *1600 columns* because my jaw is hitting the floor.