Solomon, this is a great post and thanks for sharing! Just this last week I took a similar approach with 4 large tables that had multiple columns being changed from varchar to nvarchar to support our localization effort. Much of the techniques you mention here were used with the exception of triggers. Given that we were on SQL Server 2008 I was able to use Change Tracking in place of triggers which resulted in 0 modifications to the existing tables. I'd be interested to hear how other folks have used Change Tracking or Change Data Capture. Thanks again for sharing!