Can you just specify the order in your query? Why do you care how the physical order is stored? Or do you even care about the physical order? Would an "apparent" logical order be sufficient?
If you're using postgresql strictly as a programming data store, its fine. Your app will certainly abstract away the ordering of the columns
Its just nice though, if you often find yourself working on raw tables using one of the many Admin tools. Sometimes you just need it to work like Excel to be productive. MySQL makes all of that trivial. PostgreSQL obviously keeps track of the order you created the columns, so being able to edit this ordering seems trivial in my mind.
It just seems odd that there certainly is some demand there for it, yet nobodys picked up the slack in 18 years. Obviously there are workarounds. Why dont they include the work arounds as scripts with the distrobution, etc?
Maybe I will try to implement something and submit a patch. No experience in database dev though :(
Like I said though, its not a deal breaker. I'm just used to Open Source projects over-implementing features. Not under-implementing them. Especially after 18 years.
So you only care about the logical ordering of the columns. It seems trivial then to add a column mapping layer in the metadata to map the user-defined apparent order to the physical order so that select * would return the order you want.
In relational algebra the ordering of the rows and the ordering of the columns are undefined. It's up to the database to arrange it in the best way possible. The ordering of rows and columns is specified when queried.
> Its just nice though, if you often find yourself working on raw tables using one of the many Admin tools. Sometimes you just need it to work like Excel to be productive.
Clearly this is a bug in the admin tool? I seem to recall MS SQL allows you to "drag columns around" -- obviously doing absolutely nothing to the database -- it's just a view. After all rows are just relational tuples -- they have no ordering.
True, a lot of the tooling for PostgreSQL is in its infancy when compared to something like MySQL. This problem definitely could be abstracted away by the tool. But because PostgreSQL doesnt support it natively, a side effect has been that many of the popular tools, comparable to ones in MySQL, dont have this feature either.
Anyone have any good suggestions for web frontend to PostgreSQL that supports reordering of columns as easily as MySQL? phpPgAdmin doesnt seem to compare to phpMyAdmin.
Admittedly I probably should be using a more robust OS native PostgreSQL admin tool, and not a web fronted. But alas, all of this is solved with MySQL quite nicely. I would like to see PostgreSQL catch up.
