I have a column Column
which is declared to be NULL DEFAULT(GETUTCDATE())
and there's a non-clustered index that includes this column. I want to change this column to be NOT NULL DEFAULT(GETUTCDATE())
and when I run ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN
statement the SQL Azure service says it cannot change the column because there's an index depending on this column.
That's a production database and the table holds about ten million records. So I'd rather not drop and recreate the index because that would slow down the database (especially creating the index can take minutes).
How can I change the column without recreating the index?