Hi,
I have a question relating to the ANSI_PADDING setting on some existing tables in a SQL Server 2008 R2 database I am working with.
When I generated the tables originally I basically programmatically created them by building CREATE scripts within my code. Since I did not explicitly set ANSI_PADDING to ON all these tables they seem to have been created with ANSI_PADDING as OFF. Some of these tables, which I now need to add columns to, contain varchar(n) and varbinary(n) columns. When I try to alter the tables through Management Studio, SQL Server gives me a warning: "One or more tables have ANSI_PADDING 'off' and will be recreated with ANSI_PADDING 'on'" - this seems to be generated by the ALTER statement which by default sets ANSI_PADDING to ON. Another iteration of the same warning - "Columns have different ANSI_PADDING settings. New columns will be created with ANSI_PADDING 'on'".
From what I read regarding ANSI_PADDING it seems ON is definitely the way to go.
I just need to know if changing the value may result in any of the existing data in the table to be changed or may have any other unintended side effect, as this may cause problems for me.
Riaan