Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Programming by Example

Data Types

Transact-SQL provides 27 different data types, which basically control the data that you can store in columns, variables, parameters, and expressions.

SQL Server 2000 introduced three new data types: BIGINT, TABLE, and SQL_VARIANT. BIGINT uses 8 bytes to store integers, which is 4 bytes more than the INT data type, which uses only 4 bytes of storage size. The TABLE data type behaves like a table, storing sets of rows. Be aware that the TABLE data type cannot be used by columns in tables. And finally, the SQL_VARIANT data type allows you to store almost any value (integer, character, numeric, and so on), except TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE, TIMESTAMP, and SQL_VARIANT values. The SQL_VARIANT data type is similar to the variant data type in Visual ...