pg53 (9/12/2012)
KennethJust to pick up on this point you made:
"We" do use BITs quite often. They are a nice small data type where I can fit 8 of them into a byte. Unless you have a good reason not to use them that I've never heard of I think I'll continue to not waste disk space
My understanding is that this is the behaviour of the Bit field type anyway - is there a reason why you would do your own packing into a Tinyint?
Fair point. In this particular case I only ever put 1s and 2s in my classsemester column (fall/spring) so I could easily have put this into a Bit field. And to be honest since I only had 1 bit field in the Professor table I didn't save anything over a char(1). However I still feel that the appropriate data type for a flag (only ever going to be 2 options) is a bit. In the case of ClassSemester I could have included more semesters in the future (say summer) and was leaving room for it.
All that being said my big complaint with what Joe had to say is that I used a very simple format. The minimum required to get my point across. While there were some minor points that could be argued (Id vs ProfessorId etc) they don't distract from the point of the article. Mr Celko's structure on the other hand was overly complex for what was needed. This is however just my opinion, and as my family knows my opinions should always be taken with a grain (tablespoon full) of salt.
Kenneth FisherI was once offered a wizards hat but it got in the way of my dunce cap.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following... http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/[/url]For better answers on performance questions, click on the following... http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral/66909/[/url]Link to my Blog Post --> www.SQLStudies.com[/url]