While commendable, your concern regarding adding and dropping columns is mostly misplaced.
Adding a nullable column is a metadata-oinlyonly operation: that is, it only entails minor changes to the database's definition of the table in internal tables, and does not require rewriting the clustered and all the non-clustered indexes. This means that such a modification is very fast. Likewise, dropping a column is also metadata-only, as the storage engine will simply ignore that data until each page is eventually overwritten without it.
You can see this in action in this fiddle. SET STATISTICS IO ON
is used to show reads of the table itself, and you can see that it only happens on the addition of a non-nullable column.
Your only real concerns should be:
- Possible blocking chains.
For example, a long-runningSELECT
holds aSch-S
lock on the table. TheALTER
tries to take aSch-M
lock and waits. All otherSELECT
and modification queries then pile up behind it, waiting on their ownSch-S
lock which they can' take.
Unfortunately, this can't be avoided usingWAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY
as that's not yet implemented for this type ofALTER
. Your best bet is to put the following before yourALTER
:SET LOCK_TIMEOUT 10000; -- milliseconds
- All views and procedures which access this table will need their metadata refreshed. You can use the following script, which gets all such objects and refreshes them:
DECLARE @sql nvarchar(max) = (
SELECT STRING_AGG(N'
EXEC sp_refreshsqlmodule N''' + QUOTENAME(s.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(o.name) + ''';',
'')
FROM sys.objects o
JOIN sys.schemas s ON s.schema_id = o.schema_id
WHERE o.object_id IN (
SELECT ed.referencing_id
FROM sys.sql_expression_dependencies ed
WHERE ed.referenced_id = OBJECT_ID(@yourTable)
)
AND o.type IN ('P', 'V', 'FN', 'IF', 'TF', 'TR')
);
PRINT @sql;
EXEC sp_executesql @sql;