Reclaim space following column drop

  • Hi all,

    I've got a very large table (3M+) records with a decimal column that is too wide - it's defined as a DECIMAL(18,5), but a DECIMAL(9,3) will suffice. This should save me 4 bytes per row, but after an ALTER TABLE the space used is still the same. I know there's DBCC CLEANTABLE command to reclaim space when variable columns are changed, but does anyone how I can reclaim the space after changing the DECIMAL column?

    Thanks in advance.

  • you have to rebuild all the indexes on the table, including the clustered index i believe in order to free the space to the database again.

    Lowell


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