Re: full featured alter table?

Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> writes:
>   Sven K�hler <skoehler@upb.de> wrote:
>> let's express it another way: we want to define the order of the columns
>> when they are shown in tools like phpPgAdmin or PgAdminII.

> That is something that those tools should do then. It isn't really a
> postgres issue as it already provides ways for the tools to get
> information about columns of a table.

Perhaps, but pg_attribute is the natural place to keep the column
ordering info.

ISTM we talked months ago about adding an "attlognum" column to
pg_attribute, which would be separate from "attnum" (the physical column
position) and would be used by the backend only to determine the order
of SELECT * expansion.  Admin tools could use this to determine column
display order too.  It didn't get done, but it still seems like a
reasonable idea to me.

            regards, tom lane