11/30/2023 0 Comments Alter table add columnVALUES ( language: SQL (Structured Query Language) ( sql )įourth, modify the data type of the column from VARCHAR back to INT: ALTER TABLE t1 ALTER COLUMN c INT Third, insert a new row with a character string data: INSERT INTO t1 Second, modify the data type of the column from INT to VARCHAR: ALTER TABLE t1 ALTER COLUMN c VARCHAR ( 2) Second, insert some rows into the table: INSERT INTO t1 The new data type must be compatible with the old one, otherwise, you will get a conversion error in case the column has data and it fails to convert.įirst, create a new table with one column whose data type is INT: CREATE TABLE t1 (c INT) To modify the data type of a column, you use the following statement: ALTER TABLE table_nameĪLTER COLUMN column_name new_data_type( size) Ĭode language: SQL (Structured Query Language) ( sql ) SQL Server allows you to perform the following changes to an existing column of a table: However, from SQL Server 2012 onwards, the approach has changed so that adding a column with default constraints is much better.Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use the SQL Server ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN statement to modify a column of a table. Therefore, in the prior SQL Server 2012 era, rather than adding a column with a default constraint, it is better to add a column and updating with batches so that the table is not exclusively locked. We covered the basic syntax of SQL Server ALTER TABLE in this article and implemented it to add columns to an existing table.īefore SQL Server 2012, there was no difference between adding a column with the default and adding a column and updating it. In that scenario, still, the above setting will prevail hence the previously set default value will be kept. Now, the next question is what if the Default constraint is dropped just after it is created. When a row is updated, then the default value will be pushed to the table even if the default value column is not updated. So when the column added with a default value, it will not update the data page instead it will update this system table. sys.system_internals_partition_columns DMV has two additional columns named has_default and default_value as shown below. This is achieved by a somewhat very simple but novel approach. In SQL Server 2012 and onwards, this is no longer the situation, the column is added online to the table and no update occurs and it is only a metadata change. What is the difference in these scenarios? Prior to the SQL Server 2012, when adding a column with default value will cause the same behavior. During the column update, the transaction log will grow and exclusive locking will be placed on the table prohibiting any reads or writes to the table. These stats show that there is a remarkable difference between adding a column with a default value and adding a column and updating the column with a value later. The following is the database file sizes when the column is added and updated the values. The following are the details for the query expenses captured from the SQL Profiler.Įvidently, when updating a column for a large table, resource consumption is high. The table has grown by some value as shown in the above figure. The above table shows that the table is exclusively locked which means that the table is not accessible during the update. Let us update the same column with a different value and let us get the same stats. All of these results indicate that adding a column with a default constraint will result in only a metadata change. Nothing much has changed to the data file as well as for the log file. Let us see the file sizes of the database. Also, adding a column with default value has not taken even a one minute though it has 500,000 records. This shows that Table (Object) has intended Exclusive lock which means that the table is not exclusively locked during the addition of the column.
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