On Jan 31, 2009, at 2:44 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com > wrote:

Robert Haas wrote:
People who upgrade via pg_dump will automatically get the new and
improved widget type because that is what is now called widget.  But
people who in-place upgrade will end up with the old_shitty_widget
type.  Then you just run some dead simple postupdate script that goes
through and issues ALTER TABLE commands to change each
old_shitty_widget column to a widget column.

Altering column type with ALTER TABLE needs to exclusively-lock and rewrite the whole table, so you might as well pg_dump+restore that table.

Not at all. Lots of DDL operations take table locks, but they're still a lot more convenient than dump+restore. Think dependencies.

A stickier wicket is how to handle functions and views that depend on the old type, so maybe this isn't quite as clean as I thought.

...Robert

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