Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com> writes:
> > It is desirable to have some reasonable mechanism for changing the
> > schema without requiring data to be dumped and reloaded. Otherwise it
> > is very difficult to upgrade a system which needs to be up 24/7, such
> > as many web sites today.
>
> > It is not acceptable for eBay to shut down their system for even just
> > a few hours for maintenance. Shouldn't it be possible for eBay to run
> > on top of Postgres?
>
> What's that got to do with the argument at hand? On-the-fly schema
> changes aren't free either; at the very least you have to lock down the
> tables involved while you change them. When the change cascades across
> multiple tables and functions (if it doesn't, this feature is hardly
> of any use!), ISTM you still end up shutting down your operation for as
> long as it takes to do the changes.
That's a lot better than a dump and restore.
I was just responding to Jan's comments about ALTER statements. Jan's
comments didn't appear to have anything to do with %TYPE, and mine
didn't either. Apologies if I misunderstood.
Ian
