Should the geometry column always be the last column of a postgis table?

Question

When we need to add an attribute to a table (e.g. a table of 350,000 polygons), my instinct is to always recreate the table so that the geometry column is last. I think this is a best practice for optimal performance, but I can't find any source to back this up. All imported shapefiles have the geometry column last, but I don't know if this is for performance reasons or not. I believe column order is important for some database platforms, but I'm not sure it is for PostgreSQL. Does anyone have an opinion?

Answer 1

No. There is no performance, or reason otherwise, to always, apart from consistency of course, have the geometry column last. I suspect the reason it is last most of the time is just historical due to PostGIS being an add-in rather then a built in shipped feature of PostgreSQL.

Most of the tables I manage have something like:

id integer
the_geom geometry
the rest of the stuff....

You can even have more then one geometry column per table, it is just a PostgreSQL type after all.