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From: asrrjs on 19 Apr 2010 11:48
1What is the best practice approach for migrating existing ntext columns to
nvarchar(max) for both SQL 2005 and 2008? Is it as straightforward as
ALTERing the table (e.g. ALTER TABLE X ALTER COLUMN Y NVARCHAR(max)) ? Do I
need to perform an UPDATE on the altered columns SET COL = COL after the
ALTER table so that the data is correctly allocated? Etc...
Thanks.


From: Erland Sommarskog on 19 Apr 2010 17:53
asrrjs (asrrjs(a)discussions.microsoft.com) writes:
> 1What is the best practice approach for migrating existing ntext columns
> to nvarchar(max) for both SQL 2005 and 2008? Is it as straightforward
> as ALTERing the table (e.g. ALTER TABLE X ALTER COLUMN Y NVARCHAR(max))
> ? Do I need to perform an UPDATE on the altered columns SET COL = COL
> after the ALTER table so that the data is correctly allocated? Etc...

The ALTER operation seems to be only a metadata operation. I don't see
why you would need an UPDATE. True, there are different defaults for
"text in row" for ntext and nvarchar(MAX), but I am not sure that I
see this as a compelling reason to shuffle the data around.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel(a)sommarskog.se

Links for SQL Server Books Online:
SQL 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/cc514207.aspx
SQL 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895970.aspx
SQL 2000: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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