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Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.misc -> Re: Portable way to DROP a COLUMN?..
"Jim Kennedy" <jim dot scuba dot kennedy at gee male dot com> wrote:
> Dropping a column isn't trivial and should only be done when absolutely
> necessary.
Whether the task is trivial is besides the point.
What certainly is (or ought to be) trivial is the syntax for the operation.
> Think about what occurs when you drop a column. [...]
DB-vendors collect thousands of dollars just so that I don't have to "think about what occurs" in the DB back-end, and can concentrate on my application. This was is the promise of the standalone database servers...
Dropping a column is a legitimate operation (required, for example, when the data-model changes during application's upgrade), and there is no excuse for there not being a standardized SQL way of doing it. Having such standardized vendor-agnostic way for all (most?) operations is another big promise...
Breaking these promises (however commonplace) is simply indefensible -- stop trying...
-mi Received on Thu Sep 21 2006 - 22:57:02 CDT
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