Message-ID: <4FAD6BFE.3090905@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 12:43:58 -0700
From: Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@gmail.com>
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To: Carlos Mennens <carlos.mennens@gmail.com>
CC: "PostgreSQL (SQL)" <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Finding Max Value in a Row
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On 05/11/2012 12:30 PM, Carlos Mennens wrote:
> Thanks for all the help thus far everyone! I sadly didn't
> create/design the table and would love to create a SEQUENCE on that
> particular field but not sure how unless I DROP the table and create
> from scratch.
>
> Currently the data TYPE on the primary key field (users_id) is CHAR
> and I have no idea why...it should be NUMERIC or SERIAL but it's not
> so my question is if I want to ALTER the column and create a sequence,
> would I simply do:
>
> ALTER TABLE users
> ALTER COLUMN users_id TYPE serial
> ;
>
> Obviously if any of the data stored in users_id is actual CHAR, I'm
> guessing the database would reject that request to change type as the
> existing data would match. However the data type is CHAR but the field
> values are all numeric from 1000000010 - 1000000301 so I'm hoping that
> would work for SERIAL which is just INTEGER, right?
>

Well the question to ask is if it is declared CHAR was that done for a 
legitimate reason? One reason I can think of is to have leading 0s in a 
'number'. Might want to double check that code downstream is not 
depending on CHAR behavior.

-- 
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@gmail.com