sql-lover (10/2/2012)
bteraberry (10/2/2012)
ScottPletcher (10/2/2012)
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.
You nail it down! ... that is correct ...
Can you show the results that demonstrate that claim? You only need an additional 4 bytes per row. Did you pack the table to 99-100% rather than 98%?
Now, you might have done something dopey and put the identity in your clustered key, in which case you cannot just ALTER it. And dropping and recreating the clus index would indeed be much more overhead than a simple ALTER column.
SQL DBA,SQL Server MVP(07, 08, 09) A socialist is someone who will give you the shirt off *someone else's* back.