SQL Server 2008: Bulk Datatype Change

Question

I have an SQL Server 2008 database with many tables. I\'ve been using the now lame datetime datatype and want to use the new and better datetime2.

Answer 1

This would be a bit of a brute-force method, but you could always look up all columns of datatype datetime using the sys.columns view, grab the table name and column name, iterate over that list with a cursor, and for each entry generate an ALTER TABLE statement like so:

ALTER TABLE @tablename ALTER COLUMN @columnname datetime2

Then run said statement with EXEC. Obviously, you'd need to have permissions both to query sys.columns and to ALTER all of those tables...

Apologies there isn't more code in this answer - don't have a copy of SSMS on this machine, and can't remember the syntax for all of that from memory. :)