Hi John,

You're absolutely right. The procedure involves a significant amount of data movement, which necessitates holding it in a single transaction. This can indeed be challenging, especially for large tables, making it an operation that is best performed during a planned outage window. A schema modification lock will be on the table during the process (the table will be locked).

The transaction log will grow considerably during this process. Pre-expanding the log and data files to ensure there is ample free space is a prudent approach. This can help mitigate delays caused by file growth operations and streamline the process.

Thank you for sharing your experience.