• I agree with you Steve, this has to be addressed. I would suggest Microsoft handle character data differently altogether and treat varchar as a string the same way C# or Java or ObjectiveC etc do; at least as far as removing the length specification. That's a bigger thing to accomplish since it effects the storage engine and query optimization and indexing and on and on, but this is Microsoft, I've seen what they can do and it's impressive, this can be done too.

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