Sergiy:

"By the end of the week, when the system is back online, your stuff is already packed into a box and ready for you to carry it away."

I fell out of my chair when I read that :w00t::w00t:

My favorite choices now, in order:

1) do nothing, tell the one customer no

2) add a column with proper data type, rename old column to something like "archive", rename new column to old name, check all dependencies, copy most recent months of data into new column from archive.

I haven't found any triggers, procedures, foreign keys or SSIS that use this column. There is an index which would have to be dropped and re-created.

Any other changes to .net C# code would be the developer's responsibility.