alter table

TLDR: Note to future self… (1) Read this before you modify a table on a live PostgreSQL database. If you do it wrong then your app might totally hang. There is a right way to do it which avoids that. (2) Especially remember the lock_timeout step. Many blog posts around the ‘net are missing this and it’s very important.

Recently I was chatting with some PostgreSQL users (who, BTW, were doing rather large-scale cool stuff in PG) and they asked a question about making schema changes with minimal impact to the running application. They were specifically curious about changing a primary key from INT to BIGINT.  (Oh, you are making all your new PK fields BIGINT right?)

TLDR: Note to future self… (1) Read this before you modify a table on a live PostgreSQL database. If you do it wrong then your app might totally hang. There is a right way to do it which avoids that. (2) Especially remember the lock_timeout step. Many blog posts around the ‘net are missing this and it’s very important.

Recently I was chatting with some PostgreSQL users (who, BTW, were doing rather large-scale cool stuff in PG) and they asked a question about making schema changes with minimal impact to the running application. They were specifically curious about changing a primary key from INT to BIGINT.  (Oh, you are making all your new PK fields BIGINT right?)

TLDR: Note to future self… (1) Read this before you modify a table on a live PostgreSQL database. If you do it wrong then your app might totally hang. There is a right way to do it which avoids that. (2) Especially remember the lock_timeout step. Many blog posts around the ‘net are missing this and it’s very important.

Recently I was chatting with some PostgreSQL users (who, BTW, were doing rather large-scale cool stuff in PG) and they asked a question about making schema changes with minimal impact to the running application. They were specifically curious about changing a primary key from INT to BIGINT.  (Oh, you are making all your new PK fields BIGINT right?)