Ross, I am not so sure that ALTER <object> family is used for development purposes only... Consider data warehousing where typically each day the administrator would : 1 Extract data from source database(s) - usually in ascii file format, as these dbs may be connection unfriendly, not controlled by us etc etc etc 2 Modify relevant tables in the target database and disable all constraints ( primary keys too usually ) 3 Drop all remaining indexes 4 Bulk load the source data. 5 Enable all constraints 6 Create any remaining indexes These tables tend to have a very large number of rows ( >100,000,000 ) and are often corrospondingly large ( >10GB ) and thus it is important to remove indexes and constraints to load the data in a sensible time frame ( a few hours or less). Postgresql is good at the "star" type queries that are common in such warehouse applications, and thus is well suited to move into that area - but the unimplemented ALTER features hinder this regards Mark
