Hmmm ... that looks awful. I'm presuming this is not the change script generated in EM. Given that amount of output I'd be thinking that's more to do with the database than EM itself. I've added half a dozen varchar columns to a table with just over 2mil records and it execute in a second or two.

I was actually wrong in saying that it executes sp_addcolumn, it does actually use ALTER TABLE. The script produced looks something like

BEGIN TRANSACTION

< whole lot of set statments >

COMMIT

BEGIN TRANSACTION

ALTER TABLE mytable ADD

 Col1 varchar(50) NULL

 etc...

GO

COMMIT

I agree that edit and saving table/index changes in EM is a real pain. I was gald to see that MS have finally put in a warning message when you edit large tables. However, I still maintain that EM can be the better tool for editing and generating change scripts.