Antonio Goméz Soto wrote on 17.12.2009 22:26:
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?
What's wrong with: alter table person add column address varchar(64) not null default ''; Although I don't know if such a pre-historic version like 7.3 would support that. It works for 8.4 and I believe this was working with 8.3 and 8.2 as well Thomas -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
