Re: logical column ordering

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> I'm not quite sure that I see how that's relevant. Bugs will happen,
> unfortunately, no matter how much review is done of a given patch. That
> isn't to say that we shouldn't do any review, but it's a trade-off.
> This change, at least, strikes me as less likely to have subtle bugs
> in it as compared to the dropped column case.

Yeah, that's possible. They seem similar to me because they both
introduce new ways for the tuple as it is stored on disk to be
different from what must be shown to the user. But I don't really
know how well that translates to what needs to be changed on a code
level. If we're basically going back over all the same places that
needed special handling for attisdropped, then the likelihood of bugs
may be quite a bit lower than it was for that patch, because now we
know (mostly!) which places require attisdropped handling and we can
audit them all to make sure they handle this, too. But if it's a
completely different set of places that need to be touched, then I
think there's a lively possibility for bugs of omission.

Ultimately, I think this is mostly going to be a question of what
Alvaro feels comfortable with; he's presumably going to have a better
sense of where and to what extent there might be bugs lurking than any
of the rest of us. But the point is worth considering, because I
think we would probably all agree that having a release that is stable
and usable right out of the gate is more important than having any
single feature get into that release.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company