How Can I Efficiently Remove an Identity Property from a Large Table Column in SQL Server?

The problem of removing identification attributes from large table columns in SQL Server

Question:

In a table with about 500 million rows and a size of 5GB, trying to remove the identity attribute of a specific column via SSMS resulted in a timeout. Is there any other way to achieve this via T-SQL?

Answer:

Once the IDENTITY attribute is set, it cannot be removed. To remove an entire column, use the following T-SQL syntax:

<code class="language-sql">ALTER TABLE yourTable
DROP COLUMN yourCOlumn;</code>

For detailed information about ALTER TABLE syntax, please refer here.

If you need to remove the IDENTITY attribute while retaining the data in the IDENTITY column, you can take the following steps:

1. Create a new column in the table.
2. Transfer data from an existing IDENTITY column to a new column.
3. Delete existing IDENTITY column.
4. Rename the new column to the original column name.

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