Add Column on SQL Server on Specific Place?

Question

I would like to know if there\'s a way to add a column to an SQL Server table after it\'s created and in a specific position??

Thanks.

Answer 1

As Kane says, it's not possible in a direct way. You can see how Management Studio does it by adding a column in the design mode and checking out the change script.

If the column is not in the last position, the script basically drops the table and recreates it, with the new column in the desired position.

Answer 2

No.

Basically, SSMS behind the scenes will copy the table, constraints, etc, drop the old table and rename the new.

The reason is simple - columns are not meant to be ordered (nor are rows), so you're always meant to list which columns you want in a result set (select * is a bit of a hack)

Answer 3

As others have pointed out you can do this by creating a temp table moving the data and droping the orginal table and then renaming the other table. This is stupid thing to do though. If your table is large, it could be very time-consuming to do this and users will be locked out during the process. This issomething you NEVER want to do to any table in production.

There is absolutely no reason to ever care what order the columns are in a table since you should not be relying on column order anyway (what if someone else did this same stupid thing?). No queries should use select * or ordinal positions to get columns. If you are doing this now, this is broken code and needs to be fixed immediately as the results are not always going to be as expected. For instance if you do insert a column where you want it and someone else is using select * for a report, suddenly the partnumber is showing up in the spot that used to hold the Price.

By doing what you want to do, you may break much more than you fix by putting the column where you personally want it. Column order in tables should always be irrelevant. You should not be doing this every time you want columns to appear in a differnt order.