> Hiroshi's patch would make for a good starting point by bringing in the
> ability to do the DROP COLUMN feature, as I understand, without the
> rollback capability,
No Hiroshi's patch is rollback enabled, simply because all it does is change
some system tables. It only does not free space that is used by "old" phantom
columns. This cleanup would need extra work, but for now, I guess it would be fine
to simply say that if you want to regain the space create a new table and move the
data.
Andreas
