Did you check for fragmentation?

Why would you want to pad the column with spaces? It is better to keep the database lean and let your applications add any spaces if and when they need...

As far as I know, upgrading the SQL Server does not require changing the default format of dates 🙂 Why do you need to do it?

Jason Messersmith (6/17/2010)

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I forgot to mention that this is in a data warehouse. so maybe it was to be able to join to a fiscal calendar quicker?

I...

I don't think that's a right way to store dates at all.

You have several drawbacks storing dates as integers

1. Int takes more disk space than the Date data type....