Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> If it were this simple a change, I'm not certain why (I believe) PG is
> checking each and every row to see if it will fit into the new column
> definition/type.
Because the code that does the ALTER TYPE is very generic, and it
doesn't (yet) have an optimization that tells it to skip the check and
the possible table rewrite in the cases where it's obviously not needed
(like this one).
--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.