Database Discussion - nvarchar length

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nvarchar length

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Topic: nvarchar length

Posted By: zMaestro
Subject: nvarchar length
Date Posted: 20 August 2006 at 3:56am

sorry for this newbie questions...

In mssql, does the 'length' referee to the max size of this field?

i.e. if a column is nvarchar, i set its length to 250

does this means it only holds 250 characters?

and why the ntext is set by default to 16?

thanks.

Replies:

Posted By: jeffdaro
Date Posted: 20 August 2006 at 6:11am

These are two different datatypes. In your first question, yes 250 characters is the max for THAT varchar you specified. If you made the same field in char, you'd get a 250 character field, with the spaces padded on the end of the data to fill out to 250 characters. So char is great for something like a simple zip code that will always be 5 characters, but it would be awful for say a city name since they could be any range of sizes, so you'd use varchar.

nText is the unicode version of a text field. Text fields are much like varchar but handle a lot more data.

Check out http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.phpr/2212141 - this article , which explains the basics of the SQL datatypes pretty well.