#alter column

The new “metadata-only column changes” feature in SQL Server 2016 is useless!

You might have seen this blog post by Paul White: New Metadata-Only Column Changes in SQL Server 2016. It talks about how, when a table is compressed, you can change (i.e. increase) a column’s data type without having to create a new table and migrate the data into it, and without having to refactor all of the underlying data. But, not everything is rainbows and unicorns…

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