Thanks Ross and Scott. I got it to complete finally thanks to Ross' tip of looking at pg_locks. I had to kill a few processes with exclusive locks on the table and then presto!
Scott, the query didn't have a DEFAULT keyword with it and I've got a request in with our sysadmins to upgrade us to 8.3.10. Thanks both of you for all your help. Sam -----Original Message----- From: Scott Marlowe [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, 22 April 2010 4:15 PM To: Samuel Stearns Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ADMIN] ALTER TABLE <name> ADD COLUMN Hangs On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Samuel Stearns <[email protected]> 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? And not that it matters here, but is there a reason for running such out of date pgsql code? -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list ([email protected]) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin
