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.