Paul DeBois book knows the answer if you have other VARCHAR fields in the table: ...you need to change all the columns (of type VARCHAR) at once in the same alter table statement.....The reason is that if you change a single column at a time, MySQL notices that the table still contains variable-length columns and reverts the changed column back to VARCHAR to save space. To deal with this, change all the VARCHAR columns at the same time:... ALTER TABLE branch MODIFY codebase CHAR(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Ipriori', MODIFY other_varcharfield CHAR(?) ????????; Hope that helps Hannes On 8/1/01 12:31 PM, "Lezz Giles" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm running 3.21.33b (yes, I know it's old), and I run the command: > > alter table branch change codebase codebase char(32) not null default > "IPriori"; > > where column codebase has type varchar(32) - but the type does not change to > char(32). > There's no error message or other indication of what went wrong, and if I > create > > a little play table I can succesfully change the column type to char(32) from > varchar(32). > The table "branch" has just 180 rows in it. > > I'd like to change the column types from varchar to char to speed up queries & > etc. > Can anybody shed any light on what I'm doing wrong? > > Thanks, > Lezz Giles --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
