The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL

2 Transact-SQL Data Type Nuances

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” presupposes that you can’t improve something that works reasonably well already. If the world’s inventors had believed this, we’d still be driving Model A Fords and using outhouses.—H. W. Kenton

SQL Server includes a wide variety of built-in data types—more, in fact, than most other major DBMSs. It supports a wealth of character, numeric, datetime, BLOB, and miscellaneous data types. It offers narrow types for small data and open-ended ones for large data. SQL Server character strings can range up to 8000 bytes, while its BLOB types can store up to 2GB. Numeric values range from single-byte unsigned integers up to signed floating point values with a precision of 53 places. ...