Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute?

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net>
Cc: Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Get rid of system attributes in pg_attribute?
Date: 2005-02-22 15:32:23
Message-ID: 9688.1109086343@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
>>> Does anyone know of
>>> client code that actually pays attention to pg_attribute rows with
>>> negative attnums?

> Well, the corner case would be for those times when we use oid for updating
> specific rows in a table, if a user creates there own oid column then you
> could have trouble. Actually we already have a safegaurd for this in
> phppgadmin so we wont cause mistakes, it's just that those updates probably
> won't work... others might not have been so thorough though.

Anyone who's not checking that has been at risk ever since we invented
WITHOUT OIDS:

regression=# create table foo (oid text);
ERROR: column name "oid" conflicts with a system column name
regression=# create table foo (oid text) without oids;
CREATE TABLE

Probably ctid is the more interesting case; I'm pretty sure ODBC relies
on ctid as a short-term-unique row identifier.

regards, tom lane

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