Re: Column not wide enough for data

On Mon, 2012-01-02 at 21:29 -0500, Guy Rouillier wrote:
> On 1/2/2012 4:40 PM, Guillaume Lelarge wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-12-20 at 22:29 -0500, Guy Rouillier wrote:
> >> I wanted to copy a table to another table, so I started by getting a
> >> count of the rows in the source table.  The result of "select count(*)
> >> from xxxx" came out like this:
> >>
> >> count
> >> bigint
> >> ------
> >> 26569
> >>
> >> Based on that, I concluded that a straightforward "insert into yyyy
> >> select * from xxxx" would suffice and be done in no time.  So I started
> >> running that and then went on to something else.
> >>
> >> About an hour and a half later, I realized that query was still running.
> >>    I thought that can't be right, so I cancelled the operation and
> >> reissued the count.  This time, I expanded the column and discovered the
> >> actual count was
> >>
> >> count
> >> bigint
> >> ------
> >> 26569440
> >>
> >> Since this count query produced a single column result, there is plenty
> >> of room to expand the column on initial display.  Is there a way to tell
> >> PgAdmin to expand the column to fit the data?  I could not find such an
> >> option.
> >>
> >
> > No, there's no such option. If you resize the column afterwards, and
> > then rerun the query, it'll keep the new column size. But right now,
> > it's not smart enough to guess the width of the column. I suppose we
> > don't do it yet because it would take a long time to do if you have a
> > big number of rows and/or a big number of columns. We should probably
> > revisit that.
> >
> > And sorry for the late answer.
> 
> Guillaume, thanks for the reply.  No need for the apology, everyone is 
> busy around the holidays.
> 
> I understand the problem that a large number of rows imposes on sizing 
> the column to fit the data.  Here is an alternative that is much easier 
> to implement.  By default, PgAdmin appears to allocate a fixed, equal 
> column width to all columns.  If the total width of all columns is less 
> than the display window, then divide the display window width by the 
> number of columns, and apply that equal width to all columns.  So if a 
> query produces a small number of columns, then they can be sized to fill 
> the display window.  In my case, with only a count result, the one 
> column would fill the entire width.
> 

That's an interesting idea. Not sure how much helpful wxWidgets will be
with your idea, but it will be easy to check.


-- 
Guillaume
http://blog.guillaume.lelarge.info
http://www.dalibo.com
PostgreSQL Sessions #3: http://www.postgresql-sessions.org