Column Length declaration

  • Dear Experts,
    On starting to design for a new project , I would like to know if its better to allocate double the size of the data-length anticipated to grow or to declare a length little more than what is anticipated to grow maximum. Or is it just better to give a much longer length without bothering about anything ? are there any implications of giving too long column lengths with varchar ? Int and Char are understandable though. Thank you in advance.

  • No, just make it the length it needs to be and no more, otherwise you'll get inaccurate memory grants and other such nasties when you start to run queries.

    John

  • Error slightly on the short side.  It is safer to loosen rather than tighten constraints in the future - and length is a constraint.  Screen and report layout widths are based on defined column lengths.  Large column widths will leave a developer bewildered about screen and report designs.  Some internal limitations are based on actual and others on declared sizes like little land mines that may eventually blow up.

  • Like John said, assign it to the size it should be. Databases grow, Tables, grow, but columns should not. You should know how large a field is going to be when you create your database/application. For example, you a reference might be between 8 and 12 characters, so make it a varchar(12); don't make it a varchar(24) incase, one day, just maybe, you *might* have a 13 character reference.

    If you're using an IDENTITY column, then choose an appropriate size still. If you know a table isn't going to have more than 10,000 records inserted into in, then you could use a smallint. If you want to really cover yourself create the column as a smallint IDENTITY(-32768,1); you'll have over 64,000 values to play with then.

    Queue Joe telling me off for defining a numeric column that I have no plan to do maths on.

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

  • Thanks John , Thom A and Bill .
    Thom, your approach seems suitable especially for systems with not-so-high memory if we look from the memory-grant perspective. Since SQL estimates the column data-occupied length to be half, and does the memory grant , what's the magnitude of impact when it knows that the actual grants required are little more because , a varchar(12) has occupancy above 6 (8 to 12) in your example ? I mean is it a costly operation that may impact performance ?

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