Lowell (7/31/2012)
the reason is to make is a beauty of a gui/user tool.yes for a simple add column, it's a trivial one line wonder in TSQL.
But they put logic in place that handles everything you can imagine: dropping and recreating constraints accross multiple tables, migrating the data, and all that behind the scenes so you don't have to.
things like moving a column, changing a primary key, more advanced things all require more than a one liner script;
as a result, all changes fromt he GUI go thru the advanced process...yes, it's more rounda bout, but it covers all the bases.
And it basically blows up replication in the process. It would be one thing if you could turn it off in these interfaces. But you can't and so we have to do hours of replication rebuilds because someone wants to add a column in CRM. Utterly ridiculous.