Help - clueless Oracle newbie in distress..

Hi,

I'm investigating the side-effects of changing a numeric field (integer 4) to alpha-numeric length 5 on Oracle (don't know what version, but it's on Unix. I'm just a dumb programmer who never gets to see his code running over Oracle).

It's a primary key field so I expect the corresponding index(es) to grow. I assume just 2 bytes are currently being used to store the numeric field but the new alpha field will require 5 bytes?

When we re-org the database can I expect the contents of the numeric field to vapourise or am I expecting too much for the contents to be converted to alpha-numeric automatically?

Thanks in anticipation!

-- 
Sorby
"Never knowingly understood"
http://www.wedgie.freeserve.co.uk