Hi, I recently had to do something similar: change one column from INT to BIGINT in a table which has inherited to a depth of 3 and where some of the child tables had millions of records. All affected tables have to be rewritten for such a command. One consequence of this is that you (temporarily) need up to twice the amount of disk space that the tables are currently occupying. Another is that it takes a long time - for me I ran it overnight and it took at least 6 hours. Of course it depends on your hardware. I could not find any way to check on the progress of this query .. maybe someone else can help with that. I would not recommend restarting postgres. Can't you just cancel the query (control-C on psql if that is how you sent the command) or failing that send the postgresql backend process a SIGINT (not the master backend of course, the postgres backend that is executing the ALTER command)? It should roll back to the state as before the command was entered. Regards // Mike -----Original Message----- From: stanciutheone@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:stanciutheone@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Saturday, 7 November 2009 4:55 PM To: pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: alter table is taking a long time There is no one that can tell me what i can do here, or they will do here I'm thinking to restart postgrsql but what will happen with my table that i'm just altering just a filter On Nov 7, 2:38 am, "stanciuthe...@xxxxxxxxx" <stanciuthe...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi > i have main table where and that table i have inherited 64 times, but > today i needed some extra space to a column so i have run an alter > table to one of my columns > > the query is running for over 4 hours and i don't have a clue when it > will stop, the storage of this 64 table has around 30 and milions of > records, > > Any advices on what i should need to do next, > > Regards -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general