Question

I am trying to execute the following code as part of a migration in a transaction, but the code fails unless I put the GO statement after the ADD CONSTRAINT statement:

ALTER TABLE T ADD C INT NULL
ALTER TABLE T ADD CONSTRAINT DF_T_C DEFAULT ((1)) FOR C
GO 
UPDATE T SET C = DEFAULT
ALTER TABLE T ALTER COLUMN C INT NOT NULL

If I leave out the GO statement I get the following error:

Invalid column name ‘C’.

The code executing the migration cannot handle the GO statement, how can I get this to work in a single transaction?

Answer 1

You can use EXEC for the problematic statements so they get compiled as a different batch.

EXEC('UPDATE T SET C = DEFAULT; 
      ALTER TABLE T ALTER COLUMN C INT NOT NULL')

But you can also do

ALTER TABLE T ADD C INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT DF_T_C DEFAULT ((1))

Rather than doing all these individual steps yourself.