How to change a column without dropping a table in SQL 2008

Question

Why does SQL 2008 all of a sudden want to drop my tables when I go to change the column type from say int to real? This never happened in SQL 2005 to my knowledge. Any insight

Answer 1

I can't believe the top answer has been sitting here for so long - it is very dangerous advice!

There are few operations that you can do inplace without dropping your table:

• Expand a varchar column https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/5211/changing-column-width
• Make a column nullable (but not vice-versa)
• Renaming columns using sp_rename

If you find yourself in the situation where altering a column is not possible without dropping the table, you can usually use a SELECT INTO query to project your data into a new table, then drop the old table (temporarily disabling constraints) and then renaming the projected table. You will need to take your database offline for maintenance in this case though.