After I sent my request I found the notes related to ALTER TABLE on page 1,331 of the 8.1 manual, so that helped to explain it. Your reply to my post confirmed what I thought I was reading.
Thanks for the reply,
Keaton
On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 17:16 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
Keaton Adams <kadams@mxlogic.com> writes:
> In this example the created and msg_datetime columns are currently
> defined as TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE and no default. If the alter
> table for these changes is not in-place then I would want to run it as a
> single alter with all of the changes, such as this, instead of
> individual alters for each change, correct? (Because each individual
> alter would require another table copy?)
That's why ALTER TABLE has the ability to do more than one thing in
parallel ...
regards, tom lane