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42.7. pg_attribute

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 42-7. pg_attribute Columns

NameTypeReferencesDescription
attrelidoidpg_class.oidThe table this column belongs to
attnamename The column name
atttypidoidpg_type.oidThe data type of this column
attstattargetint4  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.
attlenint2  A copy of pg_type.typlen of this column's type
attnumint2  The number of the column. Ordinary columns are numbered from 1 up. System columns, such as oid, have (arbitrary) negative numbers.
attndimsint4  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".)
attcacheoffint4  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.
atttypmodint4  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.
attbyvalbool  A copy of pg_type.typbyval of this column's type
attstoragechar  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.
attalignchar  A copy of pg_type.typalign of this column's type
attnotnullbool  This represents a not-null constraint. It is possible to change this column to enable or disable the constraint.
atthasdefbool  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.
attisdroppedbool  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.
attislocalbool  This column is defined locally in the relation. Note that a column may be locally defined and inherited simultaneously.
attinhcountint4  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.