1) Right click table name and select ‘Design’
2) In the design view click the field which you want to move
3) Then you can see an arrow/triangle on the left bar against the field
4) Click on the arrow/traingle and hold the left mouse button and drag the field to the appropriate position.

Cheers

But one cannot defend the idea that the Order of colums is not important. I would like to cite two cases:

To create a table from a tab separated CSV file in DOS format, one uses:

CREATE TABLE products
(
code VARCHAR(40),
codeSupplier VARCHAR(100),
Name VARCHAR(255)
)
GO

BULK INSERT products
FROM ‘D:\tmp\products.txt’
WITH
(
FIELDTERMINATOR = ‘\t’,
ROWTERMINATOR = ‘\n’
)
GO

One reasonably adds a column ID, as auto_increment field and as Primary key:
ALTER TABLE products ADD [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL;
ALTER TABLE products ADD CONSTRAINT PK_products PRIMARY KEY(ID);

My ID column is at the end of the table. My table shape is very ugly if you show it even in SQL Server Management Studio, ID should be at the first place.

Case 2:

One has a directory table with fields:
ID, Surname, Firstname, Birthday, Address, City, Country, Notes.

With the time passing, the developper must add a colum like Deathday, as the life is not eternal, to notify the death of our preferred singer Miachael Kackson for example.

My modified would be like
ID, Surname, Firstname, Birthday, Address, City, Country, Notes, Deathday.

It’s a very ugly table shape as Birthday and Deathday are not at the vicinity. If one edits the data in SQL management studio, the birthday and deathday columns would be better one aside another.

OK One can modify this in SQL Mangement Studio, but it would be better to do it in a quetry, as one could do in MySQL database.

Thanks !

Use SQL Server Management Studio (2008) and from the menu go to Tools -> Options -> Designers -> Table and database designers and Unselect default option “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation”

For DBA: Can change field order in “colorder” column in syscolumns table

ALTER table table_name
alter column column_name new_datatype

similarly I need to rename the column name then how it is possible?

(somebody say avoid to use the following qry sp_rename ‘newColumnname’, ‘oldname’, ‘COLUMN’)

Regards,

Raja

ALTER table table_name
alter column column_name new_datatype

I would be wary of using your method 2. This is because it would be easy to forget to add all the appropriate permissions to your new table, or possibly triggers, constraints, etc. I prefer the other options, where the original table is retained.

With regard to method 1, remember that when you use SSMS, instead of executing the changes straight away you can have the changes scripted, so you could create a scheduled job to make the changes out of hours, minimising disruption?

Or how about recreating all the columns that follow the position where you want to insert one, then systematically copy data from the “old” to “new” columns, and then drop the old column and rename the new one. An example is below, where our table originally has col1 and col3, and we want to insert a col2 in between them.

CREATE TABLE test (col1 INT, col3 INT)

INSERT INTO test VALUES (1,3)
GO 1000000

ALTER TABLE test ADD col2 INT
ALTER TABLE test ADD col3_new INT

UPDATE test SET col3_new = col3

ALTER TABLE test DROP COLUMN col3
EXEC sp_rename @objname = ‘test.col3_new’, @newname = ‘col3′, @objtype = ‘COLUMN’

SELECT * FROM [YFi].[dbo].[test]

Cumbersome, but in some circumstances it could work. If locking becomes an issue you could replace the UPDATE statements with a cursor, that only updates (and therefore locks) one record at a time? Not pretty, but it could fit this occasional requirement?

To change order of column, you just need to write column in that order in select statement.

Tejas

Regards,
Pinal

I remember when we had to swap Latitude & Longitude columns, it was a mess, so we just ended up renaming the column names.
It’s weird to see column1, Longitude, Latitude, column2 order though

SSMS sucks because it creates a TEMP table
copy everything from old table to TEMP
then rename TEMP table to your old table name
It ALWAYS times out if there is a lot of data

Do it in SQL Scripts