Hi, I am regularly altering tables, adding columns setting default values etc. This very often takes a very long time and is very disk intensive, and this gets pretty annoying. Things are hampered by the fact that some of our servers run PG 7.3 Suppose I have a table and I want to add a non NULL column with a default value. What I normally do is: alter table person add column address varchar(64); update person set address = '' where address IS NULL; alter table person alter column address set not NULL; alter table person alter column address set default ''; When the table contains millions of records this takes forever. Am I doing something wrong? Do other people have the same problems? Thanks, Antonio -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general