Question

All,

I have a populated table with the column ‘SSN‘ as data type INT. Is it is possible to convert the column ‘SSN‘, and the data within the column, to VARCHAR(#)’s.

ALTER TABLE Table1
 MODIFY SSN varchar(9);

Will that work?

Thank you!

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

alter table Table1
  alter column SSN varchar(9);

You can do a quick test to verify this will preserve the data.

create table #data(
  ssl int
)

insert into #data values(1)
insert into #data values(2)
insert into #data values(3)
insert into #data values(4)

select * from #data

alter table #data
  alter column ssl varchar(9)

select * from #data

And it never hurts to have backups before doing things like this. Even a quick insert into another table works if it’s not a huge amount of data.