Re: SQL Humor

    Consider what percentage of database servers in production have terabytes of unused disk storage available for whatever machiavelian database model some theorist chooses to dream up? Within the next 50 years, advances in quantum mechanics may allow for transdimentional data storage, but today we are constrained by budgets and the limitations of silicon and magnetic metal plates.

    What impact the 2 byte overhead has on the total width of a record depends on how many VarChar columns are included on the record layout. None of the top three database server platforms have native support for data compression, but even if they did, there is still the issue CPU cycles required fro decompression and the memory consumed by the uncompressed image.

"Mikito Harakiri" <mikharakiri_nospaum_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:1124390672.631946.49660_at_z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Razvan Socol wrote:
>> > there is not a single advantage of char over varchar2
>>
>> "varchar2" ? You seem to live in an Oracle world, but here we are MS
>> SQL Server people. And in SQL Server there is an advantage for char
>> over varchar: char(n) has takes two bytes less to store than
>> varchar(n), if the string has always n characters.
>>
>> Razvan
>
> Hmm... With todays terabytes of disc memory, are 2 extra bytes really
> that important? If storage size is really critical, then maybe column
> compression might help?
>
Received on Thu Aug 18 2005 - 21:29:12 CEST