Postgres: Reduce varchar size and truncate

Question

I currently have a Postgres 8.4 database that contains a varchar(10000) column. I'd like to change this into a varchar(255) and truncate any data that happens to be too long. How can I do this?

Answer 1

BEGIN;
UPDATE table SET column = CAST(column as varchar(255));
ALTER TABLE table ALTER COLUMN column TYPE varchar(255); --not sure on this line. my memory is a bit sketchy
COMMIT;

Answer 2

I'm not a Postgres guru, but typically you'd:

1) Update the column data using a substring method to truncate it

update t set col = substring(col from 1 to 255)

2) Then alter the table column

alter table alter column col type varchar(255)

Docs here http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/sql-altertable.html

Answer 3

Something like ALTER TABLE t ALTER COLUMN c TYPE VARCHAR(255) USING SUBSTR(c, 1, 255)