Best practice for altering a table

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Hi everyone,

I've done a fair bit of googling on this, but I haven't come to a conclusion
about the recommended procedure for altering some datatypes in a particular
table. Not surprisingly, I've discovered that some of my VARCHARs are not
long enough and I need to change them.

What is "best practice" for this sort of thing? BTW, I'm running PG 7.1.3 on
Debian 3.0.

On a related note, I assume that besides being PostgreSQL-specific, the
tradeoff for the TEXT datatype's flexibility is speed. If that's correct,
how much is the speed penalty on a database that's pretty lightly used?
(Few INSERTs, fair number of SELECTs.)

- -Tim

- --
Tim Wilson
Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA
Science teacher, Linux fan, Zope developer, Grad. student, Daddy
mailto:wilson(at)visi(dot)com | http://qwerk.org/ | public key: 0x8C0F8813
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