On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Samuel Stearns
<SStearns@internode.com.au> wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I’m running in an 8.3.3 environment. What could cause, or how can I
> diagnose, why an ‘ALTER TABLE <name> ADD COLUMN’ statement runs for hours
> eventually locking users out and requiring to be killed in the end?
By any chance you got a default on there? If so the whole table gets
updated to the default, thus rewritten and locked while this happens.