In a new table in sql server 2008 R2 that I will be setting up, I am wondering if there is a problem setting up a column size to be varchar(max) for a 'description' column I am using? I am asking the question since I am obtaining datata from a user daily from an excel spreadsheet. The maximum size for a value in an excel spreadsheet is 32,767 characters. My company says I can not ask the customer anything, I just need to work with what they give us. Do you have any suggestions?
No issues. If you were not provided a requirement explicitly stating the upper-bound, then it is smart to provide for the unexpected, in which case a MAX-datatype would be the recommendation. There is slight performance penalty for using MAX-datatypes over n-datatypes, but in your case it sounds like assuming the penalty is justified.
Also any size exceeding 8000 needs max type becuase you cannot have varchar(20000), varchar(374456), etc
ForVarchar (max) , it has 2 major considerations needed to be pointed out : · Storage Capacity Consumption since it allows for huge data entitiy to be inserted there (up to 2 GB) · Performance consistency since indexes containing such columns wouldn't get any room for online index rebuild but just only offline index rebuild where implications are expected on end users
