Hello, In this case, I don't have to alter the definition to the extent of changing the data type, but rather to change the length of a varchar field/column. I found the following from a past posting to one of the PostgreSQL user lists that does work, but I'd like something a bit more elegant and wanted to find out if anything better exists in PostgreSQL 8.1.3 before I went and altered more than my test DB. Here is what I found (note that the person he was responding to wanted to bring his varchar field from 10 to 75 characters, in light of this, why is 4 added to 75?): update pg_attribute set atttypmod = 75 + 4 where attname = 'columnname' and attrelid = (select oid from pg_class where relname = 'tablename'); The above comes from a posting made in Oct. of 2001. Also, I found this posting to this newsgroup in Oct. of last year mentioning: <quote> > Am I right in thinking that altering a column from varchar(n) to > varchar(n+m) requires each tuple to be visited? Yes. Doing otherwise would require an unreasonable amount of data-type-specific knowledge hardwired into ALTER COLUMN TYPE. </quote> What is this talking about and how does it apply to what I need to do? Thanks, Andy
