bteraberry (10/2/2012)

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ScottPletcher (10/2/2012)

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Maybe I'm missing something.

Why not just ALTER the column to be a bigint instead of an int?

He said these are very big tables. Altering the column means that every single records needs more storage space to accommodate the larger data type. Tons of downtime is likely to result because in most environments the extra space won't be available without shuffling everything around.