Re: Alter the column data type of the large data volume table.

Please do reply all.

Not sure what you mean about it taking too much time. It's rewriting a bunch of data. It's going to take a while. The best you can do is break the work up into small pieces and commit each piece.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020, 7:11 PM charles meng <xlyybz@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for your help, I think the first method I tried (adding temporary column) is similar to what you said, but it takes too much time for me.

Thanks again.

Michael Lewis <mlewis@entrata.com> 于2020年12月4日周五 上午1:11写道：

On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 11:53 PM charles meng <xlyybz@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I have a table with 1.6 billion records. The data type of the primary key column is incorrectly used as integer. I need to replace the type of the column with bigint. Is there any ideas for this?

Solutions that have been tried:
Adding temporary columns was too time-consuming, so I gave up.
Using a temporary table, there is no good way to migrate the original table data to the temporary table

Thanks in advance.

You can add a new column with NO default value and null as default and have it be very fast. Then you can gradually update rows in batches (if on PG11+, perhaps use do script with a loop to commit after X rows) to set the new column the same as the primary key. Lastly, in a transaction, update any new rows where the bigint column is null, and change which column is the primary key & drop the old one. This should keep each transaction reasonably sized to not hold up other processes.