Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes: > I was envisiging the physical number to be fixed and immutable (ie > storage position = permanent position).
There are two different problems being discussed here, and one of them is insoluble if we take that position: people would like the system to automatically lay out tables to minimize alignment overhead and access costs (eg, put fixed-width columns first). This is not the same as "I would like to change the display column order". It's true that for an ADD COLUMN that doesn't already force a table rewrite, forcing one to improve packing is probably bad. My thought would be that we leave the column storage order alone if we don't have to rewrite the table ... but any rewriting variant of ALTER TABLE could optimize the storage order while it was at it. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend