Please start any new threads on our new
site at https://forums.sqlteam.com. We've got lots of great SQL Server
experts to answer whatever question you can come up with.
Author |
Topic |
ranvir_2k
Posting Yak Master
180 Posts |
Posted - 2013-09-25 : 10:14:55
|
Hi all,I'm planning on adding an nvarchar(255) column to an existing table that has 24 million rows. The new column will have null values initially.The table is 4GB in size.Is there any way to calculate how much this will cause the transaction log to grow to?Thanks |
|
James K
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
3873 Posts |
Posted - 2013-09-25 : 10:43:06
|
quote: Originally posted by ranvir_2k Hi all,I'm planning on adding an nvarchar(255) column to an existing table that has 24 million rows. The new column will have null values initially.The table is 4GB in size.Is there any way to calculate how much this will cause the transaction log to grow to?Thanks
It should cause almost no log activity assuming your alter statement is something like this:ALTER TABLE YourTable ADD YourNewCol NVARCHAR(255) NULL; On the other hand, if you were to add a non nullable column with a default value, it would result in a lot of log activity corresponding to each row.There is one possible exception, which is that if adding the new column were to push one or more of the existing columns to row overflow data allocation units. But, on this, I don't know exactly how SQL Server handles it - whether it generates log records or not when it internally moves a column to overflow allocation units. |
|
|
|
|
|