Question

I’m changing some bad design on a table. The field I’m trying to change holds IIS7 session id’s which are long numbers. I’m trying to change the field from nvarchar(20) to int. There are 349,000 records in the table.

SQL Server Management Studio times out after 35 seconds. However, if I check the query timeout setting for the connection it is set at 600 seconds (and I can’t change it either).

Is there another timeout setting that could be causing this problem?

Here’s the error message I’m getting:
– Unable to modify table.
Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

I’ve been able to change several other tables with no problem. Of course, they had fewer rows.

This database is on a shared hosting package at Arvixe.com. Do you think this could be part of the problem?

Answer 1

Can you try to run a T-SQL script instead of doing this using the visual designer?

ALTER TABLE dbo.YourTable
  ALTER COLUMN YourColumn INT

Now, this will only work if all rows are truly valid INT values! Otherwise, it’ll bomb out at some point….

To check if all your rows are truly valid INT, you could run this query:

SELECT * FROM dbo.YourTable
WHERE ISNUMERIC(YourColumn) = 0

This will select all rows that are not valid numerics … if you get rows here, you have a problem…