Heikki Linnakangas <heikki@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> If we're going to fool with these, I'd like to renew the suggestion I
>> made awhile back that none of the system columns should have explicit
>> entries in pg_attribute, but rather their lookup should be special-cased
>> in the parser.
> What was the original reason for the proposal? Space savings?
Partly that, and partly that it'd make it much easier to alter the set
of system attributes.
> We could rename pg_attribute as pg_userattribute, and remove all the
> system attributes from that. To stay backwards-compatible, we could have
> a pg_attribute view on top of that contained the system attributes as well.
I don't really think this is necessary. How many client programs have
you seen that don't explicitly exclude attnum<0 anyway? The places that
will need work are inside the backend, and a view won't help them.
regards, tom lane
