title: Liferay ServiceBuilder doesn't alter tables
body: <h2>Short story</h2>
  
  <p>When I modify the column withs in tables.sql (VARCHAR(4000)) generated by the service builder, redeploying the portlet does not cause Liferay to alter the db tables. How can I make sure that the column withs get expanded?</p>
  
  <h2>Long story</h2>
  
  <p>I have to make some changes to a Liferay 6.1.20 EE GA2 project developed by another contractor. The project uses maven as a build tool.</p>
  
  <p>After adding some columns to the <code>service.xml</code> and running <code>mvn liferay:build-service</code>, I noticed, that the <code>portlet-model-hints.xml</code>got overriden (see <a href="https://issues.liferay.com/browse/MAVEN-37" rel="nofollow">https://issues.liferay.com/browse/MAVEN-37</a>) and resettet to the default column width.</p>
  
  <p>There's alot of data in the tables (it is running in production mode), so I cannot simply drop and recreate the tables.</p>
  
  <p>So I manually modified the column width in the generated <code>tables.sql</code> and redeployed the portlet. The new columns are now present in the db tables, but the column widths were not altered.</p>
  
  <p>Does Liferay alter column width or do I have to fire some sql statements against the database manually?</p>
  
  <p>(We are working with an oracle 10g database)</p>