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.ad...@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 <t...@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 >> > > > > -- > Jeffrey D. Adams > National Marine Fisheries Service > Office of Protected Resources > 1315 East West Hwy, Building SSMC3 > Silver Spring, MD 20910-3282 > phone: (301) 427-8434 > fax: (301) 713-0376 > -- ============================== If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
