Re: Smartest way to resize a column?

2009/1/12 Phoenix Kiula <phoenix.kiula@gmail.com>:
> I am trying to resize a column on a large-ish database (with 5 million rows).
>
> The column was 20 characters before, now I want to make it 35 characters.
>
> Challenge is: this is the main indexed column in a busy database.
>
> I tried looking at the ALTER TABLE commands available and there seems
> nothing that allows me to simply change column size from varchar(20)
> to varchar(35)?

The syntax you want (at least in more recent PostgreSQL versions, you don't
mention which version you have) is:

ALTER TABLE users ALTER COLUMN name TYPE VARCHAR(35)

HTH

Ian Barwick