Question

I have a few thousand tables in my SQL Server instance, and I need to start converted old deprecated datatypes into the new version (text to varchar(max)). Is it possible to script this out so I can just run select statement to find all of these without manually going through each of the tables in the database instance? TIA

Answer 1

SELECT OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME([object_id]),
  OBJECT_NAME([object_id]),
  name
FROM sys.columns
WHERE system_type_id IN (35,99);

You can even do this to generate a set of commands to change the tables:

SELECT 'ALTER TABLE ' 
  + QUOTENAME(OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME([object_id]))
  + '.' + QUOTENAME(OBJECT_NAME([object_id]))
  + ' ALTER COLUMN ' + QUOTENAME(name) 
  + ' ' + CASE system_type_id WHEN 99 THEN 'N' ELSE '' END
  + 'VARCHAR(MAX);'
FROM sys.columns
WHERE system_type_id IN (35,99);

Of course you’ll also want to deal with nullability etc. but this is just a starting point.