Will changing a VARCHAR(MAX) column to a VARCHAR(500) invalidate a merge replication snapshot in SQL Server 2014?

Question

We have a number of columns in a table that were created as VARCHAR(MAX) this seems to be causing performance issues with our merge replication.

We don't need these to be VARCHAR(MAX) and would like to change them to VARCHAR(500).

Will this invalidate the current snapshot and request a new snapshot to be created? This is a live environment and with the servers being in different continents the snapshot could take a while to transfer, which we need to be prepared for.

Answer 1

For anybody who has the same doubts. I can confirm that such a change will not invalidate the snapshot and so will not trigger a new snapshot. We ran the changes and the DDL scripts were simply passed to the subscriber and executed.