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Changing column data type of a large data warehouse table, what is the quickest way?

edited Apr 12, 2010 10:10AM in Database Administration (MOSC) 7 commentsAnswered ✓
Hi,
We are changing a column from integer to varchar for a large data warehouse table. I know that we can add  an extra column to save the data, drop and add back the column in question as the varchar data type, and update this column, and then drop the extra column. But this would be way too slow for such large table.
We are thinking to export the table and import it back after recreating the table with the column in varchar, but how to change the data type while exp/imp? Is there a faster way? We don't have enough space to rename the whole table and create a new table, but may have enough space to recreate one partition at a time.

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