Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 5: Creating and Altering Tables
not something to be taken lightly. Such an action is usually in the realm of the database administrator. As
such, we will consider further discussion out of the scope of this book.
ALTER TABLE
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A far, far more common need is the situation where we need to change the makeup of our table. This can
range from simple things like adding a new column to more complex issues such as changing a data type.
Let’s start by taking a look at the basic syntax for changing a table:
ALTER TABLE table_name
{[ALTER COLUMN
{ []. [(precision [, scale])] max |
[COLLATE ]
[NULL|NOT NULL]
|[{ADD|DROP} ROWGUIDCOL] | PERSISTED}]
|ADD
[[DEFAULT ]
|[IDENTITY [(, ) [NOT FOR REPLICATION]]]]
[ROWGUIDCOL]
[COLLATE ]
[NULL|NOT NULL]
[]
|[ AS ]
|ADD
[CONSTRAINT ]
{[{PRIMARY KEY|UNIQUE}
[CLUSTERED|NONCLUSTERED]
{([ ,...n ])}
[WITH FILLFACTOR = ]
[ON { | DEFAULT}]
]
|FOREIGN KEY
[([ ,...n])]
REFERENCES [([ ,...n])]
[ON DELETE {CASCADE|NO ACTION}]
[ON UPDATE {CASCADE|NO ACTION}]
[NOT FOR REPLICATION]
|DEFAULT
[FOR ]
|CHECK [NOT FOR REPLICATION]
()
[,...n][ ,...n]
|[WITH CHECK|WITH NOCHECK]
| { ENABLE | DISABLE } TRIGGER
{ ALL | [ ,...n ] }
|DROP
{[CONSTRAINT]
|COLUMN }[ ,...n]