On Fri, 24 Sep 2004, Jennifer Lee wrote: > Is there a way to select a column in a table by its position rather than > the field name? If I understand correctly column position in a table is > fixed. I've not been able to find anything in the archives or docs to > indicate that it's possible to select by position.
The general response will be that you don't really want to do this. You should figure out some other way to query the database that doesn't rely on column position. For example, dropping and adding columns with ALTER TABLE command could change their positions. If you still want to go about it, I suppose it might be possible to write a PL/pgSQL stored procedure that determines the column name from the system catalogs, then uses EXECUTE to run the query with the real column name substituted in the query. See Executing Dynamic Commands in the documentation: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/plpgsql-statements.html#PLPGSQL-STATEMENTS-EXECUTING-DYN Documentation about what is stored in the system catalogs can be found: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/catalogs.html ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html
