Should i use varchar

A byte pair is two bytes per character. But for collations for languages using Latin, Cyrillic or Greek script but based on UTF-8, that is one byte for every character.

Sorry if I state the obvious after Erland's post , but the key word you probably overlooked is pair. Using the N prefix is great advice, but it's mainly to avoid data loss when Unicode chars not available in the code page associated with the current database's default collation get converted to either?

Hi again Solomon. Did you also miss the word "pair" in that MS statement? So unless I am out-of-the-ordinary confused, you seem to say the same thing as the documentation: that range uses two bytes. The fact that both you and Martin seem to have missed that "pair" does indeed reflect that there's room for improvement in how MS phrases things, though!

No, I definitely did not miss that word ;-. I was actually responding to Martin, quoting part of this answer. However, my comment was long and I had to cut parts out to fit within the limit which is not the that it claims to be, but closer to I updated my comment earlier today to include more of the quote so it would be clearer what I was responding to.

Yes, I'm saying the same thing as the documentation, except I prefer to use number of bytes for everything as it's not only clearer, but is consistent when speaking of the other options. And yes, there are several areas of the documentation that need improvement, but only so much time in a day, and even less these days But some experts recommends nvarchar always because: since all modern operating systems and development platforms use Unicode internally, using nvarchar rather than varchar, will avoid encoding conversions every time you read from or write to the database.

For nvarchar, when using characters defined in the Unicode range ,, one character can be stored per each byte-pair, however, in higher Unicode ranges 65,,, one character may use two byte-pairs. Whereas varchar only uses 1 byte. By the way, starting with SQL Server SQL Server differences of char, nchar, varchar and nvarchar data types. If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it, thank you. Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

I would not go this route, unless I have some very special circumstances. Hello TiborKaraszi and Cathyji-msft. Unfortunately, the SQL Server Central version of it is woefully outdated as their blog mirroring no longer refreshes when the original is updated. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.

Improve this answer. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Oops, SQL Server encountered an error and terminated the statement saying string or binary data would be truncated.

As a quick fix, we can alter the table and increase the data type of the SQL varchar column, say to varchar 50 to insert the new row. We observed above how we can set or alter the string length in the SQL varchar column to meet the business needs. However, consider a scenario, where we are unsure of the data size that is going to be loaded into our SQL tables, in such circumstances, inspecting and altering data type size for each and every column is not a viable choice.

One of the options to handle this could be is to set the string length on the higher bar in the SQL Server varchar column provided you have a rough estimation of what length of the string column would be approximately. An important point to keep in consideration, we can use string length up to varchar only as this is the maximum number of characters that SQL varchar n data type can hold.

So in cases when there are chances that the string length of the varchar column might exceed bytes, using varchar or anything higher will result into an error. One short example demonstrating this fact is shown below. SQL Server got around this limitation of 8KB storage size and provided a workaround with varchar max. I got my answers on a little research that SQL Server uses page to store data and the size of each page is 8KB excluding page header, row offsets size.

If the data to be stored is less than or equal to bytes, varchar n or varchar max stores it in-row. Row in such case will only have a pointer to the LOB data page where the actual data is present and SQL Server automatically assigns an over-flow indicator to the page to manipulate data rows. In nutshell, if you know the data might exceed byte, it is a better option to use varchar max as the data type. We can refer to the DMV sys. You can also check out this link in case you want detailed explanation on how SQL Server exercises row and page limits with both varchar n and varchar max data types.

Execute the following script to insert 1 record where StringCol column value in each row is 15, B characters i. One limitation of using varchar max is we cannot create an index that has a varchar max as a key column, instead, it is advisable to do a Full-text index on that column. A quick note to make — From here to the last leg of this article, we will mention varchar in place of varchar n. The key difference between varchar and nvarchar is the way they are stored, varchar is stored as regular 8-bit data 1 byte per character and nvarchar stores data at 2 bytes per character.

Due to this reason, nvarchar can hold upto characters and it takes double the space as SQL varchar. You can go through this link to learn more about nvarchar in SQL Server. With the public preview of SQL Server , Microsoft has announced the support for UTF-8 character encoding to the existing data types varchar and char. For those, who are not aware of UTF-8, it stands for Unicode Transformation Format and is a Unicode-based encoding that supports many languages. The 8 in UTF-8 means it uses 1 byte 8-bits to represent a character in memory.

Likewise, UTF uses 16 bits 2 bytes to represent a character. This helps in minimizing character conversion issues. UTF-8 support for varchar data type provides substantial storage savings depending on the character set in use.