Change Text field to TextArea

Question

I have a request from my users to change a Text field to a Text Area. 
 This is a custom field in a custom module, so no concerns about "messing up" the out of the box. 
 I know I can't do this in Studio, and the sane thing to do would be create a new field and copy the data from one to the other and make the users change any reports, dashboards, filters etc.. they may have. 
 But users are lazy... and I'm a little crazy... 
 Are there any counter-indications to trying to do this by manipulating the vardefs for that custom field and modifying the DB field from varchar(255) to text? (we are on-site and can do crazy things at times... not that we should...) 
 
 thanks, FrancescaS

Francesca Shiekh · Accepted Answer

No problem if you are on-site. 
 When you run an SQL like 
 ALTER TABLE mytable MODIFY COLUMN mytext TEXT ; 
 the current content of the column will be converted to text. 
 Even in the cloud you could use the extension framework to "overwrite" the datatype of the column by a vardef extension (if you know it will work on-site) and the data will be copied over.