Hi Jeff,
read carefully, he said it does stuff ON DISK, which means that all of your fields must be physically remade (so it a lot more than telling it "it's an int4, Sheila", which is what just modifying the catalog would do). Since you are not a dba be aware that you are producing a new record for each of the existing ones, and thus bloating things quite a bit. You may want to vacuum it asap :)
Bèrto
On 13 April 2012 16:30, Jeff Adams
<jeff.adams@noaa.gov> wrote:
so i can? if so, how do i go about? i should mention that, while i dabble in postgres dba activity, it is not my day job...On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Tom Lane
<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
I wrote:
> No, that is an actual on-disk change (making the field physically
> wider), so it's going to cost ya. There are some cases where the
> on-disk representation doesn't change and so a catalog update isn't
> needed, but int4->int8 isn't one of them.
Sheesh, hit send too quickly on that. Of course I meant "and so a
catalog update is all that's needed".
regards, tom lane
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