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.