title: How do I make ALTER COLUMN idempotent?
body: <p>I have a migration script with the following statement:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALTER TABLE [Tasks] ALTER COLUMN [SortOrder] int NOT NULL
  </code></pre>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>What will happen if I run that twice? Will it change anything the second time? MS SQL Management Studio just reports "Command(s) completed successfully", but with no details on whether they actually did anything.</p></li>
  <li><p>If it's not already <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence" rel="nofollow">idempotent</a>, how do I make it so?</p></li>
  </ol>