Re: Best practice for storing long text fields


Many thnaks for your replies.

Just to clarify the issue:
The requirement is to create a table that has say 6 columns which store
strings (such as Description, Notes, etc.) Each of these 6 columns
should store a char string of max length of 4000 characters. The
problem is that SQL Server 2000 will not work if I simply defined the
columns as varchar(4000) as at some point the row size reaches the page
size of 8060 and this generates an error. There is a 8060 bytes limit
on SQL Server 2000 rows. Note that I am not trying to store the same
string into 6 different columns spanning from column to column. I have
a separate string to store in each column.

The question:
What is the best way to implement this in SQL Server 2000. In
particular I am looking at two options: Setting each of the 6 columns
to be of type 'text'. Looking at the documentation, it appears that
this would behave for as long as each string is not longer than 4000
characters and I am happy to have this limit. It however is unpleasant
to use the text type for longer than 4000 char strings, as in this case
I understand there are some specific ways of handling the data. Option
two is to create a new LongStrings table with 2 columns - long unique
number and varchar(4000). Each string is stored in this LongStrings
table and is crosreferenced (by using the unique ID) with its original
cell in its original table. Now I'd preffer option 1 (provided I do not
have to do anything special to handle the strings) and would like to
avoid option 2 because it is not easy to write queries to get the data.

Second question is what is the situation with SQL Server 2005. I
understand I can simply define the columns as varchar(max) and do not
have to do anything special. Has someone used this successfully and can
you confirm it ste case?

Thanks for your help.

Tzanko


@sh wrote:
Cool!


"Erland Sommarskog" <esquel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns983D9BE59C16AYazorman@xxxxxxxxxxxx
@sh (spam@xxxxxxxx) writes:
Are you saying that in SQL 2000 you can Span VarChar's into multiple
columns automatically? If so how?

No. What I said is that on SQL 2005 a row can span pages, so that you can
have more than 8060 bytes per row.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

.

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