[wccrawford]

Interesting. But if this is important, why doesn't Postgres do it invisibly, automatically? Surely there's a most-correct sequence, with the longest values first, and the shortest values last, and then (probably) the variable-length values?

It could then happily report back the data in the order that the DB Admin/developer expects.

[jeltz]

Because nobody has implemented it yet. A patch would be very welcome by many but nobody has written one.

[j45]

Updating column rows in MySQL is pretty trivial, and I've wondered why it's not the same in Postgres, even at the GUI level.

Ordering columns for performance might be a different order of reccomendation.