On Jan 31, 2009, at 2:44 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@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
