Problem with Postgres ALTER TABLE

Question

Hi, I have one problem with the ALTER TABLE in postgre. I want to change size of the varchar column. When I try to do this, It says that the view is dependent on that column. I can't drop the view because comething else is dependent on it. Is there any other way than to drop everything and recreate it again?

I just found one option, which is to remove the table joining from the view, when I will not change the returned columns, I can do that. But still, there is more views I'll need to change. Isn't there anything how can I say that it should be deferred and checked with commit?

Answer 1

I have run into this problem and couldn't find any way around it. Unfortunately, as best I can tell, one must drop the views, alter the column type on the underlying table, and then recreate the views. This can happen entirely in a single transaction.

Constraint deferral doesn't apply to this problem. In other words, even SET CONSTRAINTS ALL DEFERRED has no impact on this limitation. To be specific, constraint deferral does not apply to the consistency check that prints ERROR: cannot alter type of a column used by a view or rule when one tries to alter the type of a column underlying a view.