[sql] How to change the length of a column in a SQL Server table via T-SQL

So, let's say you have this table:

CREATE TABLE YourTable(Col1 VARCHAR(10))

And you want to change Col1 to VARCHAR(20). What you need to do is this:

ALTER TABLE YourTable
ALTER COLUMN Col1 VARCHAR(20)

That'll work without problems since the length of the column got bigger. If you wanted to change it to VARCHAR(5), then you'll first gonna need to make sure that there are not values with more chars on your column, otherwise that ALTER TABLE will fail.