Posted by Jens on 03/21/06 10:56

> How do you know that? If Surya says he wants to add a column in a place
> in the table, it is probably because that this is his requirement.

Not every requirement means that this should be implemented, many
requirements are sourced by the lack of knowledge of the people.

> There are several reasons why you want to add new column anywhere in the
> column list. We frequently add columns (and drop) to our tables, and it
> would be a complete mess, if column order was historic. I try arrange
> columns in a logical order, so that it's easier to read the database
> documentation, so it's easier to view data with "SELECT *", which we
> use a lot when looking at data from Query Analyzer.

If the only reason is to get the data in QA the right way, why don´t
you craete a view for each table suing *your* selection order as you
are prefering to it. Although some flavour of displaying data are the
same, it is truly possible that the one developer want to see the
columns in the the colum1,column2, column3..column32 and another one
want to see col
column32..colum1,column2, column3. Who will decide what sort is *right*
by default ?


> Crap. This is a very good feature that is missing from SQL Server, and
> if you see the link that Razvan posted, you find that that suggestion
> has attracted quite a few votes.

First of all, thanks for the polite and detailed explanation in the
first sentence. :-) As I already said, only because some people are
voting for something, that doesn´t always mean that this is useful.

> > If you really want to do this (but I would suggest you not
> > to do this) you have to recreate the table with the new column in
> > between and copy alle the data from the old table to the new table.
>
> Yes, that is what we do today. ALTER TABLE as it is today is essentially
> worthless; it can be used only exceptionally.

Good, that we share the same thought in one place :-)


-Jens Suessmeyer.

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