"it's possible to seamlessly drop the view, alter the underlying table and recreate it" And if that were the only problem it wouldn't be too bad, except that o

"it's possible to seamlessly drop the view, alter the underlying table and recreate it" And if that were the only problem it wouldn't be too bad, except that other databases don't inflict this task or limit the degree of the problem far better. Unfortunately the problem isn't limited to views. Materialized views, for instance, have to be dropped and recreated along with their indexes. That can involve a large IO operation; one that risks failure. Pretty soon an otherwise innocuous ALTER TABLE that conceptually has zero impact on dependencies becomes a major undertaking.