Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute? - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Greg Sabino Mullane
Subject Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute?
Date
Msg-id 23e891bbea1c80ce1f00762f9a7959b0@biglumber.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute?  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
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> It occurs to me that without the explicit entries, we could stop
> considering the system names to be reserved column names --- that is,
> we could allow users to create ordinary columns by these names.
> (The procedure for looking up a column name would be to first try in
> pg_attribute, and if that failed to check an internal list of system
> column names.)  If you did make such a column, then you'd be unable to
> get at the system column you'd masked in that particular table.  I'm
> unsure offhand if this would be a good thing or bad.

This sounds bad to me. Maybe not for things like cmin and cmax, but I
use ctid a lot, and would be quite thrown off if a table suddenly were
allowed to create it's own ctid column that did not behave as the current
one does. Perhaps if it was called "pg_ctid?" 1/2 :)

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200502211318
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8

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