SQL Server - Column Length

[Mattastic]

Hi,

When creating a table, and specifying the length of the datatype. Is this determined by the number of charactors or size in bytes?

Is there anyway to configure it to determine the size by bytes?

Thanks

[Guest]

For string data, it's bytes. For the various numeric types, the length is defined by the numeric type (tinyint, int, float, etc.)

[Mattastic]

Thanks for your reply.

I dont quite understand that, could you please explain a bit more?

So If I used the ntext datatype it would store the data by memory taken up? Other wise it stores the data using charator length?

[paross1]

From BOL....

ntext

Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum length of 230 - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters. Storage size, in bytes, is two times the number of characters entered.

Phil