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The catalog pg_attribute stores information about table columns. There will be exactly one pg_attribute row for every column in every table in the database. (There will also be attribute entries for indexes, and indeed all objects that have pg_class entries.)
The term attribute is equivalent to column and is used for historical reasons.
Table 43-7. pg_attribute Columns
| Name | Type | References | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| attrelid | oid | pg_class.oid | The table this column belongs to |
| attname | name | The column name | |
| atttypid | oid | pg_type.oid | The data type of this column |
| attstattarget | int4 | attstattarget controls the level of detail of statistics accumulated for this column by ANALYZE. A zero value indicates that no statistics should be collected. A negative value says to use the system default statistics target. The exact meaning of positive values is data type-dependent. For scalar data types, attstattarget is both the target number of "most common values" to collect, and the target number of histogram bins to create | |
| attlen | int2 | A copy of pg_type.typlen of this column's type | |
| attnum | int2 | The number of the column. Ordinary columns are numbered from 1 up. System columns, such as oid, have (arbitrary) negative numbers | |
| attndims | int4 | Number of dimensions, if the column is an array type; otherwise 0. (Presently, the number of dimensions of an array is not enforced, so any nonzero value effectively means "it's an array") | |
| attcacheoff | int4 | Always -1 in storage, but when loaded into a row descriptor in memory this may be updated to cache the offset of the attribute within the row | |
| atttypmod | int4 | atttypmod records type-specific data supplied at table creation time (for example, the maximum length of a varchar column). It is passed to type-specific input functions and length coercion functions. The value will generally be -1 for types that do not need atttypmod | |
| attbyval | bool | A copy of pg_type.typbyval of this column's type | |
| attstorage | char | Normally a copy of pg_type.typstorage of this column's type. For TOAST-able data types, this can be altered after column creation to control storage policy | |
| attalign | char | A copy of pg_type.typalign of this column's type | |
| attnotnull | bool | This represents a not-null constraint. It is possible to change this column to enable or disable the constraint | |
| atthasdef | bool | This column has a default value, in which case there will be a corresponding entry in the pg_attrdef catalog that actually defines the value | |
| attisdropped | bool | This column has been dropped and is no longer valid. A dropped column is still physically present in the table, but is ignored by the parser and so cannot be accessed via SQL | |
| attislocal | bool | This column is defined locally in the relation. Note that a column may be locally defined and inherited simultaneously | |
| attinhcount | int4 | The number of direct ancestors this column has. A column with a nonzero number of ancestors cannot be dropped nor renamed |
In a dropped column's pg_attribute entry, atttypid is reset to zero, but attlen and the other fields copied from pg_type are still valid. This arrangement is needed to cope with the situation where the dropped column's data type was later dropped, and so there is no pg_type row anymore. attlen and the other fields can be used to interpret the contents of a row of the table.
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