Is there anyway I can change a field to allowing nulls without dumping
the table, dropping it, recreating it as desired, and filling all the
data back in?

Thanks,
Rob Mosher

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Rob Mosher <mosher (AT) andrews (DOT) edu> writes:
ALTER TABLE ... DROP NOT NULL does the trick in recent releases. Before
that, you could resort to manually poking the attnotnull flag in
the pg_attribute row for the field.

regards, tom lane

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Rob Mosher wrote:
ALTER TABLE tab ALTER COLUMN col DROP NOT NULL;

HTH
--
e-Trolley Sayegh & John, Nabil Sayegh
Tel.: 0700 etrolley /// 0700 38765539
Fax.: +49 69 8299381-8
PGP : http://www.e-trolley.de

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On Feb 16, 2004, at 4:57 AM, Rob Mosher wrote:

<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-altertable.html>

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com


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I hope this gets indexed correctly as I hosed the original and tried a cut-n-paste of the subject line,

For that, I have this which I didn't write myself but snagged from somewhere. Maybe pgsql-general???


-- This function takes a table and column and will set the column
-- to allow NULLs.
--
-- $Id$
--
DROP FUNCTION kl_setnull(name, name);
CREATE FUNCTION kl_setnull(name, name) RETURNS boolean AS '
DECLARE
tablename ALIAS FOR $1;
colname ALIAS FOR $2;
rec_affected int;
BEGIN
-- If any params are NULL, return NULL - this means function
-- can be defined isstrict.
IF tablename IS NULL OR colname IS NULL THEN
RETURN NULL;
END IF;

-- Lock table with standard ALTER TABLE locks
EXECUTE ''LOCK TABLE '' || quote_ident(tablename) || '' IN ACCESS EXCLUSIVE MODE'';

-- Update the system catalogs
EXECUTE ''UPDATE pg_attribute SET attnotnull = false WHERE attrelid = (SELECT oid FROM pg_class WHERE relname = '' || quote_literal(tablename) || '') AND attname = '' || quote_literal(colname);

-- Get number of rows modified
GET DIAGNOSTICS rec_affected = ROW_COUNT;

-- Return number of rows modified
RETURN (rec_affected = 1);

END;
' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql'
WITH (isstrict);
--
joe speigle
www.sirfsup.com

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I will try this out as soon as I can. Thanks to all who replied.

Rob Mosher

Tom Lane wrote:

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