Updating a temp table in a stored proc

Well I just spent twenty/thirty minutes realising that when you change the definition of a temporary table being used in an SQL Server stored procedure, you need to actually delete the temp table before you can recompile the procedure. So, something like

IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#tableName', N'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #tableName;
CREATE TABLE #tableName(
Key1 INT
, Description NVARCHAR(255)
)
/* do stuff with table */

IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#tableName', N'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #tableName;
CREATE TABLE #tableName(
Key1 INT
, Key2 INT
, Description NVARCHAR(255)
, AggAmount FLOAT
)
/* do stuff with table referencing agg amount column*/

Then the table definition won’t update when you change it in code without dropping the stored definition. You can highlight the drop statement and run that by itself, and then it’ll recompile your code.

Simple, but easy to miss.

Hope I saved somebody a little hair-pulling.