[AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various

Stuart McLachlan stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Tue May 25 18:50:38 CDT 2004


On 25 May 2004 at 16:28, Francisco H Tapia wrote:

> >  
> >
> Storage, albeit nowadays cheap, is still and should continue to be a 
> consideration for the lenght of a field.  A 20 Character address may be 
> too small especially when I've ran len selects to grab the maximum size 
> of an address field and have come up with: 53.  In Sql Server I can make 
> my varchar field up to 8000 characters for this field but does it really 
> make sense?, I can join and index it as well, but does it make sense to 
> do so?
> 
> Both of you should heed that just because you can doesn't mean you 
> "should".  Run a sample select on the existing data that your customers 
> use, if their max LEN on the address field is 20 characters expand that 
> by a few more as to give a tolarnce.  YOU WILL NEVER get it 100% perfect 
> as far as lenghts are concerned. but limiting the amount of space will 
> improve your storage needs.

No it won't!

That's the whole point.  In "days gone by", you had to determine the 
size of text fields because  db engines allocated the full amount of 
that space for every record whether you used it or not.

In Access, SQL Server etc, whether you define the field size as 20 or 
255, makes NO difference to the size of the resulting database. 

There is now NO reason to arbitrarily limit the size of a text field 
below the system limit of 255 characters.








 
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