Julien Rouhaud <rjuju...@gmail.com> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 10:21 PM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I wonder if we'd get complaints from changing the catalog column layouts
>> that much. People are used to the name at the front, I think. OTOH,
>> I expected a lot of bleating about the OID column becoming frontmost,
>> but there hasn't been much.
> I don't think that would be comparable. Having an extra oid in the
> 1st column doesn't really make a raw SELECT * harder to read. But
> having the XXXname column way behind, and not even at the end, means
> that most people will have to type an extra "xxxname," for each
> throwaway query run to quickly verify something. I know that I often
> do that, and while I could live with it I'd rather not have to do it.
Yeah, it would annoy the heck out of me too. Again there's a potential
technical solution, which is to decouple the user-visible column order
from the storage order. However, multiple people have tilted at that
windmill without much success, so making it a prerequisite for improving
the name-length situation doesn't seem like a smart plan.
regards, tom lane
