Re: ALTER TABLE .. ALTER COLUMN .. ERROR: attribute .. has wrong type

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 10:25:05AM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > I don't have a clear recollection how I solved this in July; possibly by
> > restoring the (historic, partition) table from backup.
> >
> > Last week again again just now (both under 9.6), a colleague found that he was
> > able to avoid the error by ALTER TYPE without USING.
> >
> > Note that we ALTER TABLE .. NO INHERIT the partitions for all but the most
> > recent 2 months before ALTERing them (or the parent). The "ALTER NO INHERIT"
> > and the ALTER TYPE of historic partitions are done outside of a transaction in
> > order to avoid large additional disk use otherwise used when ALTERing a parent
> > with many or large children (the sum of the size of the children).

Here's DETAILs for a 2nd such error which has shown up today:

(EricssonUtranXmlParser): Failed to alter table eric_umts_rnc_utrancell_metrics: ERROR: attribute 424 has wrong type
DETAIL: Table has type smallint, but query expects integer.

(EricssonUtranXmlParser): Failed to alter table eric_umts_rnc_utrancell_metrics: ERROR: attribute 361 has wrong type
DETAIL: Table has type integer, but query expects smallint.

Also, note both alters really do work without "USING":

ts=# begin; drop view umts_eric_ch_switch_view, eric_umts_rnc_utrancell_view, umts_eric_cell_integrity_view; ALTER TABLE eric_umts_rnc_utrancell_metrics ALTER COLUMN PMSUMPACKETLATENCY_000 TYPE BIGINT USING PMSUMPACKETLATENCY_000::BIGINT;
BEGIN
DROP VIEW
ERROR: attribute 424 has wrong type
DETAIL: Table has type smallint, but query expects integer.
ts=#

ts=# begin; drop view umts_eric_ch_switch_view, eric_umts_rnc_utrancell_view, umts_eric_cell_integrity_view; ALTER TABLE eric_umts_rnc_utrancell_metrics ALTER COLUMN PMSUMPACKETLATENCY_000 TYPE BIGINT ;
BEGIN
DROP VIEW
ALTER TABLE
ts=#

Is it useful to send something from pg_attribute, or other clues ??