On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 10:18 AM Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> Tell me, please, why > > ALTER TABLE <tablename> ALTER COLUMN <columnname> SET DATA TYPE BIGINT > > will not do the job? > > I've found some varchar columns in a couple of tables too small and used > the > above to increase their size. Worked perfectly. > Something else noteworthy is that with varchar, there is no rewrite of the table. You are just removing or loosening the length restriction on a variable width column type. I believe you could change all columns from VARCHAR(n) to TEXT or VARCHAR(n+X) and have it take almost no time at all since you are only impacting the catalog tables (pretty sure about that at least). With a fixed width column like int4 to int8, all the rows need to be actually re-written.
