Oh, I 100% agree with you.

> IMO these kinds of "shortcuts based on column naming across tables" usually end in disaster down the road.

I can see that point, and that was not what I wanted to express with my litmus test. It's only supposed to be a litmus test after all. In a proper solution there would be additional things I would be looking for, but so far everything I've seen already fails that "trivial" test.

One could easily re-formulate it, so that in the one tabel the column is named ".firstname", and in the other one it is named ".first_part_of_the_name".

The core point is more that no matter the relational logic you layer on top of a table/view, that logic should be paramterizable by table/view/column names, to be properly relocatable. I'd be happy about suggestions for better examples! Some solutions (I think dbt) do have some relocateability across schemas, but usually in a more singleton-like manner rather than being able to instantiate the logic multiple times.

I can just tell you that I interact with queries that would benefit from such kind of reuse on a daily basis. One common thing would also be mechanisms that you want to reuse across many different tables in your schema. E.g. soft-deletes or historic/snapshot tables. Nowadays those kinds of solutions usually end up being expressed in the ORM/query builder of a programming language (and thus highly fragmented across programming language ecosystems), instead of living on an SQL-like level and being able to mature better.

Curious what your opinion on plpgsql functions is? Could easily solve your initial problem (if I follow). They don't seem to come up much though