Insanity
Today I’ve come across a new definition of insanity. It is this;
Expecting an update of every row in a 13 million row table (which is subject to frequent updates) to complete in one pass without timing out.
Of course, this wouldn’t be necessary if the system in question was running a version of PostgreSQL that was released after 2003. Damn those risk averse system administrators.
I should probably explain. In versions of PostgreSQL before release 8 you cannot increase the size of a column. Therefore to increase the size of one of the columns in our production database we have to add a new column, copy the contents of the old column to the new column, rename both columns and then drop the old column. Now that is what I call a database refactoring.
Yea i feel your pain. Could you not have pd_dumped the data and created copied the old table structure and pg_restore to the new structure???
I’ve tried this a couple of times with good results but not with 13 M rows!!!.
Comment by Chris Clarke — September 21, 2007 @ 9:57 pm
We looked at it, but bearing in mind that other updates are happening to the table in real time it was a little impractical.
Comment by Andy Todd — September 21, 2007 @ 9:59 pm
[...] Insanity [...]
Pingback by Python Bytes - Today’s Top Blog Posts on Python - Powered by SocialRank — October 1, 2007 @ 8:04 pm