> It's really unfortunate how much of database technology requires manual tweaking, what is sensible and optimized should be the default behavior. Obviously for

> It's really unfortunate how much of database technology requires manual tweaking, what is sensible and optimized should be the default behavior. Obviously for ALTER statements reordering of columns could mean a huge table rewrite, but there'd still be ways to handle it. I find that problematic with Postgres anyway as it doesn't allow moving columns. In SQL server, rearranging columns is fairly easy (still needs table rewrite) and it often makes sense, both from performance point of view (if you often read the same set of columns) as well as for program logic (reflecting the data logic in column order). But then again you pay for those SQL Server features..