Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 03:10:30PM -0600, Decibel! wrote:
>> IIRC the community did come to a consensus on allowing for a
>> different logical ordering from physical ordering, it was an issue of
>> actually doing the work. If this is an itch you want to scratch, you
>> might look into fixing that problem instead.
> Err, as I recall it was decided that the chance for confusion was too
> high.
> http://www.mail-archive.com/pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org/msg85548.html
That message was about an approach that didn't have consensus ;-)
The ultimate conclusion was that a three-way split (identity, logical
position, physical position) could work because most of the code only
cares about column identity; the places where logical or physical
positions are important are pretty narrowly circumscribed, or could
be made so.
regards, tom lane
