Tom,

Well... there's a lot of data hiding in each of those rows... as much as 4MB in 
each.  I'll make allowances in my code so that adding a column without a 
default is a workable solution. 

Thank you,
Eric

On Nov 1, 2011, at 8:27 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Eric Smith <eric_h_sm...@mac.com> writes:
>> Thank you for the response... to be perfectly honest, I don't know enough to 
>> know what I'm not telling you.  Below is the string I use to create the 
>> table, so you can see the contents.  I don't think I have foreign key 
>> references or triggers of any kind.  Any ideas? (this is 8.3 running on Mac 
>> OS 10.7)
> 
> I'm wondering how much data is hiding behind this column:
> 
>>      [tableString appendString:@"\"imageData\" bytea null,"];
> 
> Since you're installing a non-null column default value, the ALTER TABLE
> ADD COLUMN command has to rewrite the entire table.  If there are large
> images hiding in each of those "only 14000" rows, there'd be a lot of
> data to copy over and so it could take awhile.
> 
> (In contrast, ADD COLUMN without a default value is speedy because
> Postgres plays some tricks to avoid rewriting the table data.  That
> won't help you if you have to install non-null values in the new
> column, but it's good to know that there's a difference.)
> 
>                       regards, tom lane


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