While renaming the column name, the square bracket is included in the column name, which I think is a bug, Here is a sample code snippet, create table [TestTable] (TestColumnName nvarchar(30)) select TestColumnName from TestTable sp_rename '[TestTable].[TestColumnName]', '[RenamedColumnName]', 'Column' select [RenamedColumnName] from TestTable -- does not work "Invalid column name 'RenamedColumnName'." select RenamedColumnName from TestTable -- does not work "Invalid column name 'RenamedColumnName'." select * from [TestTable] -- works fine!!! The bug here is that the column rename includes the square brackets, I found this which says that the "first character must be one of the following", but "[" does not seem be included in the list, can there be a problem with sp_rename or sql server itself, as it allows alteration of column name to start with a square bracket.