On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 03:55:14PM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:
> On Saturday 04 August 2007 09:45, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> > Rohit Khare wrote:
> > > Seeing the history of PostgreSQL development, following features are
> > > expected in pgAdmin:
> > >
> > > (1) Facility to insert a column in between other columns during table
> > > design.
> >
> > This I can see how people like, actually. Theorists claim it's not
> > needed since column order really doesn't matter, but during development
> > things will just "look nicer". So I can agree with this.
>
> We've gotten requests like this at times for phppgadmin, and I think our
> standard mantra has evolved into "re-implementing core database features in
> the gui client tends to cause nasty surprises for our users". We actually
> have some experience with this, since we used to implement alter table drop
> column before it lived in postgresql, and we often had users complaining of
> the limitations it had and the things that broke when they used it.
>
> Looking at the OP's problem, the basic idea would be to create a new table and
> then do some renaming hackery, adding the new column while pulling
> information from the old table, but you run into all sorts of problems with
> dependent objects when you do it that way. *shrug* Thats not news to people
> who have studied it, thoough most people don't seem to grasp what is going on
> in the system as a whole.
If someone's going to work on that, I'd much rather see the effort
expended on allowing the database to actually do this natively, since
it's something people have been asking for forever.
--
Decibel!, aka Jim Nasby decibel@decibel.org
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)
