"Dave Lee" <davelee.com@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > and I notice that there isn't any rows specified for converting > varchar or text to int. Which raises the question, if I run: > SELECT '123'::int; > What conversion is actually happening here? None. There is no type coercion there --- what that is really specifying is invocation of the int data type's input function on the given string. I don't think your approach is going to work; you would have to make your client programs emit things like insert into mytab(integercol) values (''::varchar) in order to get a runtime varchar-to-int cast to be applied. At that point you might as well fix them properly. regards, tom lane