Anyone have an agnostic way to alter a columns type...simply the size...?

What do you want to do?

There is an ALTER TABLE statement for that:
Certain restrictions apply, however. Check the manual of the DB2 version you are using (depending on your platform).

I am trying to alter the column size, from 256 to 1024, but I want the sql stmt to work on mysql...postgres...etc...agnostic?

so on postgres, this works...

alter table 'tablename' alter column 'column name' type varchar(1024);

but does not seem to work on mysql for instance...

So you are interested in portable DDL syntax?

Since you are asking in a DB2 newsgroup, we can answer this question for DB2 (which is what I did).

For other systems, you will have to look at the respective manuals. I guess that your chances are pretty slim to find a consistent cross-product systax. For MySQL or PostgreSQL, you can actually change the product yourself or open a bug requesting that those products adopt a different syntax.

On DB2 V8, you can only increase the size of a varchar column online, you cannot decrease it. Not sure about V9.

Marcus_A,
on v9.5 Linux/Unix/Windows decrease of column size is also not possible.
Grofaty