Enterprise manager taking up to 10 minutes to save design changes

Hi,
I am running SQL 2000 with an 8 GB database. I have two relatively large
tables (each with about 2 million records in them), and I occasionally need
to make changes to the table design (add a column, increase the size of an
existing field, etc.) on these two tables through the Enterprise Manager.
However, saving these changes can take betwen 5-10 minutes to complete.
If I make changes to any of my other smaller tables, they are saved
instantly. Is it really supposed to take this long for larger tables to be
updated?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Never make a change to a production db with EM. Most of the time it will
create a temp table, copy all the data over from the original, drop the
original and then rename the temp table to the original name. Most of the
time a simple ALTER TABLE is all you need to issue. If it is something
simple like increasing a varchar column it might just be a meta data change.
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
"Stu" <Stu@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BACB0B6C-FDA2-439A-BFA5-A5672AE7AE21@.microsoft.com...
> Hi,
> I am running SQL 2000 with an 8 GB database. I have two relatively large
> tables (each with about 2 million records in them), and I occasionally
> need
> to make changes to the table design (add a column, increase the size of an
> existing field, etc.) on these two tables through the Enterprise Manager.
> However, saving these changes can take betwen 5-10 minutes to complete.
> If I make changes to any of my other smaller tables, they are saved
> instantly. Is it really supposed to take this long for larger tables to
> be
> updated?
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.