Making a varchar bigger

Hello Group,

I've run into a bit of a problem, I have a varchar(6) field that I now need to
have as a varchar(12).

I am relatively new to postgres and am unsure how best to do this. What I
would like to do is alter the meta-data directly. Change the value of
atttypmod in pg_attribute directly. Initial tests look good, however I am
unsure how safe this is. Or what else needs to be done? does it need to be
re-indexed?

I have looked at the sections on renaming/changing columns, though this is
more a solid an option, I am dealing with millions of records and the
downtime for the backfill is not acceptable.

I found some old post in here hinting at doing this, however the links in them
are now dead.

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Derik Barclay <dbarclay(at)givex(dot)com>, Systems Software Engineer
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