On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Jeff Davis wrote: > > They also state that they have more sophisticated ALTER TABLE... > > > > Only usable feature in their ALTER TABLE that doesn't (yet) exist in > > PostgreSQL was changing column order (ok, the order by in table creation > > could be nice), and that's still almost purely cosmetic. Anyway, I could > > have used that command yesterday. Could this be added to pgsql. > > > > I agree with your message except for that statement. MySQL alter table > provides the ability to change column types and cast the records > automatically. I remember that feature as really the only thing from MySQL > that I've ever missed. > > Of course, it's not that wonderful in theory. During development you can > easily drop/recreate the tables and reload the test data; during production > you don't change the data types of your attributes. > > But in practice, during development it's handy sometimes.
I still remember a post from somebody on the phpbuilder site that had changed a field from varchar to date and all the dates he had got changed to 0000-00-00. He most unimpressed, especially since he (being typical of a lot of MySQL users) didn't have a backup. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
