OK, forgive my ignorance here, but the maintainer of our custom data type code is no longer with us and this is new territory for me. We do have a function which takes our custom data type and returns a cstring. Is there a pg function which converts a cstring to text type? This seems to be the missing link to eventually get the data to float4[]. Mike Alvaro Herrera wrote: > Mike Charnoky wrote: >> Our database schema was designed before postgresql supported arrays and >> contains a custom type which is basically a float4 array. I would like >> to clean things up and convert the custom datatype to float4[], as this >> would obviate the need for us to compile a custom shared object. We are >> hitting problems with pg8.3 and I would rather just drop the custom stuff. >> >> Problem is, I cannot do an ALTER COLUMN: >> >> mydb=# alter table mytable alter column mycolumn float4[]; >> ERROR: column "mycolumn" cannot be cast to type "float4[]" > > You can specify a USING clause to let the system know exactly how to > convert your type to float[]. I suspect you can use float4in() and > something to read out your type into the format that float4in expects (a > hacked up version of your out function perhaps). > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
