Column Re-ording Status

We often see people asking on the Postgres mailing lists about re-ordering columns of existing tables and/or adding columns into tables at varying positions within the column order. Often time those questions get responses like “see the archives” or “it’s been mentioned before” which are about as helpful as the are informative. I was going to follow-up one of those comments on the list today with a more detailed explanation, when I was reminded by Greg Smith’s words that any problem that requires a sufficiently lengthy explanation should probably be a wiki page, and instead add a page to the Postgres wiki on ”altering column position”. It re-caps common work-around’s to the problem, and also gives some information on what it would take to implement this in Postgres. I would encourage folks to update/edit it as appropriate, and hopefully we can help people work around this current limitation.