I am using a plugin, and due to the way that plugin creates "option_name" values, these names can exceed the 64 character limit of the "options_name" column in the DB.
You can read about this issue here and how it has been discussed but nothing done about it for 4 years. https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/13310#comment:33
So, I have been forced to modify the table myself to make the size 255 rather than 64. The problem is that I cannot update one of my sites to 4.0 because the update causes the column width to be changed, truncating all of the long option_name values to 64, which completely breaks the site.
What I need is information on how to prevent the update from modifying that table column. I have tried this, it does not work on this table: http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Do_not_upgrade_global_tables
Any help on how I can hook into the update process to prevent this change would be greatly appreciated.