Re: ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN Hangs

Thanks Ross and Scott.  I got it to complete finally thanks to Ross' tip of looking at pg_locks.  I had to kill a few
processeswith exclusive locks on the table and then presto! 

Scott, the query didn't have a DEFAULT keyword with it and I've got a request in with our sysadmins to upgrade us to
8.3.10. Thanks both of you for all your help. 

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Marlowe [mailto:scott.marlowe@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, 22 April 2010 4:15 PM
To: Samuel Stearns
Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] ALTER TABLE <name> ADD COLUMN Hangs

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Samuel Stearns
<SStearns@internode.com.au> wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I'm running in an 8.3.3 environment.  What could cause, or how can I
> diagnose, why an 'ALTER TABLE <name> ADD COLUMN' statement runs for hours
> eventually locking users out and requiring to be killed in the end?

And not that it matters here, but is there a reason for running such
out of date pgsql code?