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Asked: 2026-05-15T15:43:22+00:00

I created a set of partitioned tables in Postgres, and started inserting a lot

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I created a set of partitioned tables in Postgres, and started inserting a lot of rows via the master table. When the load process blew up on me, I realized I should have declared the id row BIGSERIAL (BIGINT with a sequence, behind the scenes), but inadvertently set it as SERIAL (INTEGER). Now that I have a couple of billion rows loaded, I am trying to ALTER the column to BIGINT. The process seems to be working, but is taking a long time. So, in reality, I don’t really know if it is working or it is hung. I’d rather not restart the entire load process again.

Any suggestions?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Restart it (clarifying edit: restart the entire load process again).

    Altering a column value requires a new row version, and all indexes pointing to the old version to be updated to point to the new version.

    Additionally, see how much of the advise on populating databases you can follow.

    Correction from @archnid:

    altering the type of the column will trigger a table rewrite, so the row versioning isn’t a big problem, but it will still take lots of disk space temporarily. you can usually monitor progress by looking at which files in the database directory are being appended to…

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