Monday, September 28, 2015

Altering tables in the SQLDB service on Bluemix

My blog has been quiet for some weeks thanks to some offline vacation and due to some business trips. Last week I first spoke about DB2 at a conference, then coached developers at a Bluemix hackathon. At that Bluemix event I was asked whether it would be possible to change some column definitions for an existing table. It was easy to say "absolutely", but it turned out to be harder than thought because at first I couldn't how to do it. So let's document it... :)

Once you have provisioned a SQLDB database service on Bluemix and launch the administration console, you are greeted by the "Getting Started" screen prominently featuring the following three choiced:
IBM SQL Database: Getting Started

The "Run Queries" button is intended to perform SQL SELECTs, nothing else.