Guidelines for Scheduling Data Definition Tasks

Once the database exists and other users have access to it, you must perform additional data definition operations, such as adding or modifying tables or indexes.

Schedule data definition operations for times when database usage is low. All other users are blocked, though only briefly, from reading or writing to a table while you are creating or altering that table.

For more information on concurrency rules during data definition, see Table Locks for DDL Operations.