Re: Column not wide enough for data

On 1/2/2012 4:40 PM, Guillaume Lelarge wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-12-20 at 22:29 -0500, Guy Rouillier wrote:
>> I wanted to copy a table to another table, so I started by getting a
>> count of the rows in the source table. The result of "select count(*)
>> from xxxx" came out like this:
>>
>> count
>> bigint
>> ------
>> 26569
>>
>> Based on that, I concluded that a straightforward "insert into yyyy
>> select * from xxxx" would suffice and be done in no time. So I started
>> running that and then went on to something else.
>>
>> About an hour and a half later, I realized that query was still running.
>> I thought that can't be right, so I cancelled the operation and
>> reissued the count. This time, I expanded the column and discovered the
>> actual count was
>>
>> count
>> bigint
>> ------
>> 26569440
>>
>> Since this count query produced a single column result, there is plenty
>> of room to expand the column on initial display. Is there a way to tell
>> PgAdmin to expand the column to fit the data? I could not find such an
>> option.
>>
>
> No, there's no such option. If you resize the column afterwards, and
> then rerun the query, it'll keep the new column size. But right now,
> it's not smart enough to guess the width of the column. I suppose we
> don't do it yet because it would take a long time to do if you have a
> big number of rows and/or a big number of columns. We should probably
> revisit that.
>
> And sorry for the late answer.

Guillaume, thanks for the reply. No need for the apology, everyone is
busy around the holidays.

I understand the problem that a large number of rows imposes on sizing
the column to fit the data. Here is an alternative that is much easier
to implement. By default, PgAdmin appears to allocate a fixed, equal
column width to all columns. If the total width of all columns is less
than the display window, then divide the display window width by the
number of columns, and apply that equal width to all columns. So if a
query produces a small number of columns, then they can be sized to fill
the display window. In my case, with only a count result, the one
column would fill the entire width.

Thanks.

--
Guy Rouillier