AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA

• inHouseDBA

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  February 22, 2026 at 2:56 am

  #4738485

  Hello,

  I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in each of the tables, when, in fact, the values stored in those tables are way less than 256.

  So the Actual Size of each row in those tables is way less then 500, but when I run below queries for my table it shows AllocationType(TypeDescription) as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA. And yes, I know that I need to fix the Column sizes and the initiative is on its way.

  But still, should I be worried or as long as the actual size of the rows is less then 8K, then I am good and I should ignore those queries:

  Thank you very much in advance.

  SELECT t.object_id AS ObjectID, OBJECT_NAME(t.object_id) AS ObjectName, SUM(u.total_pages) * 8 AS Total_Reserved_kb, SUM(u.used_pages) * 8 AS Used_Space_kb, u.type_desc AS TypeDesc, MAX(p.rows) AS RowsCount FROM sys.allocation_units AS u JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON u.container_id = p.hobt_id JOIN sys.tables AS t ON p.object_id = t.object_id GROUP BY t.object_id, OBJECT_NAME(t.object_id), u.type_desc ORDER BY Used_Space_kb DESC, ObjectName;

  • This topic was modified 6 hours, 54 minutes ago by inHouseDBA.