Re: feature request - adding columns with default value

do ANY databases do this? How does it fit the SQL standard. And, whether you do
it manually or the ALTER TABLE command does it, it's still going to block other
updates.

Henrik Steffen wrote:
> hello,
>
> when doing an "alter table blub add column blah int2"
> and then issuing an "alter table blub alter column blah set default 0"
> I will always have to manually "update blub set blah=0" to initialize
> all existing records.... this is quite annoying while performing this
> update on a running database with 100 simultaneous clients accessing
> the database and about 443482 rows in the table.
>
> it takes about 10 minutes to perform this update, and for about 6 minutes
> all other updates to the table are in status "waiting", this leads to
> a very high load and all max_connection setting is reached soon
> (on a Dual-Xeon 2.4 GHz machine with 2 GB RAM)
>
> i would suggest to change the "alter table add column" function to
> adding a default value while adding the column if this is possible
> and if this minimizes "down-time".
>
> thank you
>
> --
>
> Mit freundlichem Gruß
>
> Henrik Steffen
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>
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