Alter column length with liquibase

Question

I am having problems changing a column length in my postgres db with liquibase.

I have a table account with a field description varchar(300). I want to change it to varchar(2000).

I have dropped and recreated the primary key in the same file so I don't have permissions issues or schema / db names or anything like this. For the sake of testing I have cleared the table of data.

I am running

<changeSet author="liquibase" id="sample">
    <modifyDataType
        columnName="description"
        newDataType="varchar(2000)"
        schemaName="accountschema"
        tableName="account"/>
</changeSet>

I'm getting this error text but I can't understand the issue. The only constraint the column had was a not null constraint and I successfully added a separate changelog to remove this constraint (ignoring the fact I don't see why this would affect extending the length of the field).

Can anyone point to what I am doing wrong?

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
What went wrong:

Execution failed for task ':db-management:update'.

liquibase.exception.LiquibaseException: Unexpected error running Liquibase: Error parsing line 37 column 38 of src/main/changelog/db.changelog-accountdb-1.1.xml: cvc-complex-type.2.4.a: Invalid content was found starting with element 'modifyDataType'. One of '{"http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":validCheckSum, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":preConditions, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":tagDatabase, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":comment, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":createTable, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropTable, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":createView, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":renameView, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropView, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":insert, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addColumn, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":sql, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":createProcedure, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":sqlFile, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":renameTable, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":renameColumn, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropColumn, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":modifyColumn, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":mergeColumns, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":createSequence, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":alterSequence, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropSequence, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":createIndex, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropIndex, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addNotNullConstraint, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropNotNullConstraint, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addForeignKeyConstraint, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropForeignKeyConstraint, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropAllForeignKeyConstraints, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addPrimaryKey, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropPrimaryKey, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addLookupTable, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addAutoIncrement, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addDefaultValue, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropDefaultValue, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":addUniqueConstraint, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":dropUniqueConstraint, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":customChange, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":update, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":delete, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":loadData, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":executeCommand, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":stop, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":rollback, "http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9":modifySql}' is expected.

score 44 · Answer 1 · edited May 11 '21 at 16:39

44

You can increase the size of your column like this:

<changeSet author="liquibase" id="sample">
    <modifyDataType
        columnName="description"
        newDataType="varchar(2000)"
        tableName="account"/>
</changeSet>

edited May 11 '21 at 16:39

luiscla27

4,956
37
49

answered Jun 26 '19 at 10:23

aashii

617
5
6

1

For MySQL when i use `modifyDataType` it also removes the **NOT NULL** constraint on the column. I use `addNotNullConstraint` on columns to adjust the data type where I need to keep it not null. – Gabe Gates Dec 13 '22 at 19:27

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '16 at 09:44

7

The schema defintion in your xml file doesn't allow <modifyDataType ... />.

The version of the xsd file should match the version of Liquibase you are using. The exception looks like you are using the xsd of version 1.9, see http://www.liquibase.org/documentation/xml_format.html

answered May 20 '16 at 09:44

Roland Weisleder

9,668
7
37
59

Thanks. Sorry a based it on a colleagues code rather than starting from scratch and didn't even consider versioning. Many thanks. – gringogordo May 20 '16 at 13:03

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 08 '21 at 11:48

In YAML syntax it would look like:

databaseChangeLog:
  - changeSet:
      id: sample
      author: liquibase
      changes:
        - modifyDataType:
            columnName: description
            newDataType: varchar(2000)
            tableName: account

for XML syntax see aashii's answer.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 06 '19 at 14:00

In Oracle a TEMP column has to be used. Below is an example;

<?xml version="1.1" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
 <databaseChangeLog xmlns="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
               xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-3.5.xsd">

<changeSet id="example_id.001" author="Jasper">
    <preConditions>
        <not>
            <columnExists tableName="USERS" columnName="ADDRESS_TEMP"/>
        </not>
    </preConditions>
    <comment>change column ADDRESS_TEMP to 20 length</comment>

    <addColumn tableName="USERS ">
        <column name="ADDRESS_TEMP" type="varchar(2000)" />
    </addColumn>

    <sql>update USERS set ADDRESS_TEMP=ADDRESS</sql>
    <dropColumn tableName="USERS" columnName="ADDRESS" />

    <addColumn tableName="USERS">
        <column name="ADDRESS" type="${numeric_20_0}" >
            <constraints nullable="false"/>
        </column>
    </addColumn>

    <sql>update USERS set ADDRESS=ADDRESS_TEMP</sql>
    <dropColumn tableName="USERS" columnName="ADDRESS_TEMP" />
</changeSet>

</databaseChangeLog>

Alter column length with liquibase

4 Answers4