title: How to reduce size of SQL Server table that grew from a datatype change
body: <p>I have a table on SQL Server 2005 that was about 4gb in size.</p>
  
  <p>(about 17 million records)</p>
  
  <p>I changed one of the fields from datatype <code>char(30)</code> to <code>char(60)</code> (there are in total 25 fields most of which are <code>char(10)</code> so the amount of char space adds up to about 300)</p>
  
  <p>This caused the table to double in size (over 9gb)</p>
  
  <p>I then changed the <code>char(60)</code> to <code>varchar(60)</code> and then ran a function to cut extra whitespace out of the data (so as to reduce the average length of the data in the field to about 15)</p>
  
  <p>This did not reduce the table size. Shrinking the database did not help either.</p>
  
  <p>Short of actually recreating the table structure and copying the data over (that's 17 million records!) is there a less drastic way of getting the size back down again?</p>