13 ms·

I know, I know. Its a minor gripe. But think about how trivial something like this would be to implement. And with the power of an Open Source project as big

I know, I know. Its a minor gripe. But think about how trivial something like this would be to implement. And with the power of an Open Source project as big as Postegre, just seems odd nobody's had a weekend to knock it out. Here we are discussing all these cool advanced features, and it doesnt even have something as simple as this :P I'll certainly try, if I thought they'd ever accept a patch from a total newb. PostgreSQL obviously keeps track of the column order, as far as the order you created them in goes. So being able to edit this order doesnt seem like that tall of an order. Would be a pretty convenient feature that many other DB's do infact have. Its just a nicety that PostgreSQL should have, if its hoping to win over people who are familiar with MySQL, which does sorta seem like its goal these days.

deleted 14y ago
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jacques_chester 14y ago
I'm going to guess that MySQL can do this largely as a side-effect of swappable engines. There is, however, a lot to be said for close coupling between query planning, on-disk format, indexing and so forth. edit: as for patching, the PostgreSQL source is some of the best I've ever read. Carefully organised, fastidiously documented, immaculately consistent to coding standards. It's a delight.
pilif 14y ago
Trivial? The rows are ordered in creation order because that's how they are stored on disk. So to be able to move columns around, you either have to rewrite the whole table (needing a long-lasting exclusive lock which most of the schematic altering operations in postgres do not require) or you introduce another abstraction to keep track of the order which you then have to use for every query to get the correct position within the row you just read. This always means more complexity and a performance overhead and frankly provides next to zero value because columns are named in queries anyways (or the order becomes meaningless when joining)

deleted 14y ago

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jacques_chester 14y ago

I'm going to guess that MySQL can do this largely as a side-effect of swappable engines. There is, however, a lot to be said for close coupling between query planning, on-disk format, indexing and so forth. edit: as for patching, the PostgreSQL source is some of the best I've ever read. Carefully organised, fastidiously documented, immaculately consistent to coding standards. It's a delight.

pilif 14y ago

Trivial? The rows are ordered in creation order because that's how they are stored on disk. So to be able to move columns around, you either have to rewrite the whole table (needing a long-lasting exclusive lock which most of the schematic altering operations in postgres do not require) or you introduce another abstraction to keep track of the order which you then have to use for every query to get the correct position within the row you just read. This always means more complexity and a performance overhead and frankly provides next to zero value because columns are named in queries anyways (or the order becomes meaningless when joining)