Real shame there has been no progress on this even after over 6 years...

Not functionality that is required often - but generally speaking, when renaming columns, I suspect that the most common use case is to update legacy db's to confirm with a consistent naming strategy - and in most cases this will involve renaming multiple columns within the same tables. For this use case, bulk renaming is essential.

I have just been tasked by a client to perform this task on a legacy db - and I have identified 51 tables with 770 dependant entities that require updating. Most of these tables have between 5 and 20 fields. Using the Smart Rename tool to do this would require somewhere in the region of ~8,000 separate scripts to be generated... which is obviously completely nonsensical.

I believe that for the majority of the alterations I will be quicker to script them manually, as the benefits of being able to update 10 fields in a single stored proc in one go outweigh much of the automation gains for those tables which have a low number of dependencies.

As there's no bulk rename, I can't quantify that. The pain of changing over 500 columns piecemeal is not something I wish to inflict upon myself.

Quantification on the single-column front comes down to "how long is a piece of string?" and varies from month to month from zero, to a few columns - mostly zeros.

Like I said, as there's no bulk rename, i.e., rename every column in a given table, how can I give you a number? If it were present, likely there would be several timebox projects carving up the renames from light impact first through pervasive, over the course of at least a year.

Apologies for a somewhat woolly answer...

Can I ask, how much do you use the smart rename feature for a single rename, vs for batch renames?

The multi-rename ability would be MOST useful when one is charged with modyfying column names to conform to "generally accepted best practices". The legacy (dung heap of insanity) I just inherited features part of the table name as the prefix in 95% of all column names, rendering like-column-name-recognition nigh on impossible. I have HUNDREDS of columns to rename and, for example, taking a 50-column table through the rename process piecemeal is obviously a painful undertaking.

If I could use all 25 votes for just "Bulk Rename" I would!

Or in the opening dialog, give us the option to "Add more columns to rename". I, too, find the repetitive nature of multiple column renames a very time-consuming exercise. Granted we don't typically do it very often, but when renaming four columns in the same table, to have to generate and merge four scripts seems a little O.T.T. and something that "Smart" Rename should handle for us... Any chance you can give us this great feature?

By 'accept a list of name changes' I mean import from a data format.