How to alter table when full text search is enabled?

Question

I have address table in which city field have nvarchar datatype, but I want to change datatype nvarchar to varchar. For that I have write the script

ALTER TABLE Address ALTER COLUMN City varchar(50) null

but when I execute this I have got the error message:

Msg 7614, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot alter or drop column 'City' because it is enabled for Full-Text Search.

So how can I resolve this error? I don't know anything about full text search.

Answer 1

You probably have a full text index on the table and that is not allowing you to alter a column with that.

So you can try:

DROP FULLTEXT INDEX ON Address

And then try:

ALTER TABLE Address ALTER COLUMN City varchar(50) null

And then you have to see what the index contains and recreate it

Answer 2

It would be wiser to check the contents of the full text index first before dropping it.

Also you might be better off using the following code instead:

ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON tableName  DROP (ColumnName)

This will remove the fulltext index on only that column.