It's rumoured that Bruce Momjian once said:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> "Dave Page" <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk> writes:
>> > What about the addition of pg_attribute.attrelid &
>> > pg_attribute.attname/attnum in RowDesription messages to identify
>> > the underlying attribute (where appropriate)?
>>
>> Well, we can talk about it, but I still think that any frontend that
>> relies on such information is broken by design. (And if that means
>> the JDBC spec is broken, then the JDBC spec is broken.)
>>
>> Just to start with, if I do "SELECT * FROM view", am I going to see
>> the info associated with the view column, or with the hypothetical
>> underlying table column? (Actually, didn't I already make a list of a
>> bunch of ways in which this concept is underspecified? AFAIR, you
>> didn't suggest answers to any of those questions ... but we need
>> answers to all of them if we are going to implement the feature.)
>
> I was willing to add a hack to enable default column labels to be
> "table.column" --- that seemed like the least obtrusive.
That would help, but not in the cases that cause the most grief - for
example when the column has been aliased in the original query - that
should override the label of course, but then we still need to parse the
SQL at the client to figure out what's going on.
Regards, Dave.