Re: deprecating the use of OIDs

Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> writes:
> (1) Add a GUC var, with a name such as "default_use_oids", defaulting to
> true. This controls whether a CREATE TABLE that doesn't include WITH or
> WITHOUT OIDS gets created with OIDs.

This I think was pretty noncontroversial.

> (2) When dumping a table, spit out a "SET default_use_oids = xxx" before
> the CREATE TABLE. This means that if a table was previously created WITH
> OIDS (either explicitly or by default), it will continue to have OIDs
> when the dump is restored (regardless of the default value of the GUC
> var). We could specify WITH or WITHOUT OIDS as part of the CREATE TABLE
> itself, but there were objections earlier about maintaining the
> cleanliness of the SQL produced by pg_dump:

It doesn't seem to me that this really buys much. What we really want
is a way for a dump/reload to remove OIDs from tables that formerly had
them; otherwise people will not easily be able to migrate their existing
tables away from having OIDs.

> ... and a single SET can apply to
> multiple CREATE TABLEs.

Not unless you want partial pg_restores to break.

regards, tom lane