Posted by Gert-Jan Strik on 10/15/07 20:53

If you change this using the ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN command, then
you will see no immediate effect, apart from the fact that you can now
store larger strings. Make sure you don't (accidentally) change the
NULL/NOT-NULL setting. The ALTER statement will need a schema lock, but
probably just for a fraction of a second (assuming no blocking).

If you actually start replacing shorter strings with longer strings, you
could get more page splits and thus fragmentation.

--
Gert-Jan


MikeJ wrote:
>
> i have a table with 6 million row
> what is the affect of increasing a varchar(255) column
> to varchar(500)
>
> tia
> MJ

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