Posted by NiTiN on 08/04/06 07:17

panic attack wrote:
> Erland Sommarskog wrote:
> > panic attack (tunc.ovacik@gmail.com) writes:

-- SNIP --

> CREATE TABLE [nwind].[dbo].[DDD] (
> [Col001] varchar (255) NULL,

-- SNIP --

> [Col543] varchar (255) NULL
> )

-- SNIP --


Hi!

I know I said earlier that you could use long data types, and the table
you're trying to create is in accordance with my statement earlier.
However, I should have added that each column stores a pointer in the
row and the actual data is stored in a different location. If you add
up the sizes of the pointers along with other row data they should be
below the ~8K limit too. I guess I should be more accurate when I say
something in future like those people who speak legal-ese. The DDL
query was really funny to look at, and it's the first time I ever used
the "read more" link on Google Groups.

I would suggest that you partition your tables vertically so you have
some of the columns in one table and the other columns in another table
(...or perhaps more than 2 tables, depending on the sizes... I'm not
really good at the math).

N.I.T.I.N.

PS: I hope I never have to deal with such a monstrosity - a table that
has so many columns. I once had to deal with 36 columns and that was
too much for me as a developer (that was before my days as a DBA). I
split it up into 3 tables though people may say it is less efficient to
have 3 queries instead of one (remember the days when people said you
should use assembly language as the code is smaller & faster?).

PPS: No offence to assembly language developers in the last 'PS'. I
totally respect people who still use assembly, but for me it's just a
little too much source code to think straight - I'd spend a whole hour
doing something that I could do in 15 minutes with VB, Java or C# (when
equipped with the right IDE, of course!).

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