Re: Increasing the length of a VARCHAR column without table rewrite

Eric,

Is the table in question so large that you can't afford the time it
would take to perform ALTER COLUMN TYPE?

I definitely would not go poking around in system catalogs and changing
things there.  Not unless you *want* to trash your database...  The fact
that 'todo' has not yet been implemented suggests that it is not a
simple matter of changing one attribute in a system catalog.

Lewis


Eric Comeau wrote:
> ALTER TABLE .... ALTER column TYPE varchar(xxx)
>
> We need to increase the length of a varchar(256) column in two of our
> largest tables preferrably to TEXT.
>
> Is there a way to do this without having to go through a complete table
> rewrite?
>
> I have googled and seen the todo on the wiki, but I'm wondering if we are
> increasing the length of a varchar column can we manually modify the system
> catalogs to increase the length?
>
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo#ALTER
>
>
> Version: PG 8.1.17
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
>
>
>
>