Q:

Best way to do a long running schema change (or data update) in MS Sql Server?

I need to alter the size of a column on a large table (millions of rows). It will be set to a nvarchar(n) rather than nvarchar(max), so from what I understand, it will not be a long change. But since I will be doing this on production I wanted to understand the ramifications in case it does take long. 
Should I just hit F5 from SSMS like I execute normal queries? What happens if my machine crashes? Or goes to sleep? What's the general best practice for doing long running updates? Should it be scheduled as a job on the server maybe?
Thanks

A:

Please DO NOT just hit F5.  I did this once and lost all the data in the table.  Depending on the change, the update statement that is created for you actually stores the data in memory, drops the table, creates the new one that has the change you want, and populates the data from memory.  However in my case one of the changes I made was adding a unique constraint so the population failed, and as the statement was over the data in memory was dropped.  This left me with the new empty table.
I would create the table you are changing, with the change(s) you want, as a new table.  Then select * into the new table, then re-name the tables in a single statement.  If there is potential for data to be entered into the table while this is running and that is an issue, you may want to lock the table.
Depending on the size of the table and duration of the statement, you may want to save the locking and re-naming for later, and after the initial population of the new table do a differential population of new data and re-name the tables.
Sorry for the long post.
Edit:
Also, if the connection times out due to duration, then run the insert statement locally on the DB server.  You could also create a job and run that, however it is essentially the same thing.

