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Making major table alterations; how to protect data?


Benmcfc

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Hi all,

 

I'm about to make major alterations to a few of my tables in order to create v2 of a certain service that depends on them.

 

The issue is that there is already a lot of data in there from v1. For example, in v1 there is a varchar field in one of the tables containing the date and time, which is being replaced with timestamp. Elsewhere, there are some new columns, some columns being removed, etc.

 

What I am wondering, is if I can maintain the old data whilst making these changes, or whether this is impossible? Obviously, I will be making a full backup of the db before starting to make the changes.

 

Thanks in advance.

No, a varchar will not convert into a date type. I would add the new date field and use a script to convert the varchar version and update the date field. Then you can remove the varchar field containing the dates.

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