Hugo Kornelis (8/9/2010)

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Good question! When I first saw it, I thought there would be a very high percentage of correct answers since the confusing default lengths for character strings have already been covered in a few recent QotD's. But the results say that at this time, only 53% of the respondents have given the right answer, so there is obviously still a lot of need to keep driving this point home. Good job, magasvs!

paul.knibbs (8/11/2010)

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Isn't that pretty much what VARCHAR(MAX) is?

There is sometimes a HUGE performance penalty (2:1) to be paid for using VARCHAR(MAX) depending, of course, on what you're doing. Correct sizing is always important. I'd dare say the same would be true for most any language... even .Net.

paul.knibbs (8/23/2010)

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Well, the person I was responding to never mentioned anything about performance, he just wanted a text field that can be any length in T-SQL, and I was pointing out that already exists.

Jeff Moden (8/23/2010)

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There is sometimes a HUGE performance penalty (2:1) to be paid for using VARCHAR(MAX) depending, of course, on what you're doing. Correct sizing is always important. I'd dare say the same would be true for most any language... even .Net.

magasvs (9/27/2010)

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There were columns like Year nvarchar (255), PostalCode nvarchar (255), Phone nvarchar (8000)...

magasvs (9/27/2010)

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The problem with wide columns is that even though SQL Server supports now larger row size the maximum capacity specification is still 8,060 bytes per row. If the row becomes wider - then row overflow occurs and data is saved differently.