Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 10/01/22 11:19

(bozzzza@lycos.co.uk) writes:
> Yhe problem is we have had some data supplied and the all the fields
> lengths are set to 255 (nvarchar), even though this is not good pratice
> we could live with it until someone else wanted a fixed length export
> of the data.
>
> So my idea was to work out the length of the fields and insert them as
> the maximum width into the new table. Then the fixed length file would
> look a lot better and cleaner.

Maybe. But what if the max lengths you find do agree with the actual
business rules? Next time you get a refresh, you could get an error
because of truncation.

So I would suggest that either you find out the actual max lengths, or
you leave the table the way it is.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

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