Re: Some frustrations with admin tasks on PGSQL database

On 17/08/07, hubert depesz lubaczewski <depesz(at)depesz(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 07:49:08PM +0800, Phoenix Kiula wrote:
> > I have dropped all indexes/indicises on my table, except for the
> > primary key. Still, when I run the query:
> > UPDATE mytable SET mycolumn = lower(mycolumn);
>
> can you please check this:
>
> select count(*) from mytable;
> select count(*) from mytable where mycolumn ~ '[A-Z]';
>
> and if the second is lower than first make the update:
> update mytable set mycolumn = lower(mycolumn) where mycolumn ~ '[A-Z]';
>
> of course if your data contain national characters you have to include
> them (upper case only) in this regexp.

Wow, smartest advice of the day! Yes, a lot of our data in that column
has dots and numbers (800,000 compared to 6 million), so I wanted to
get only to the stuff that was pure alphabets, but just didn't think
of how.

[Slithers away to get dunce cap].

Thanks much!