How to manage varable sized fields in MS SQL Server

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I have table, in which i want to add some variable sized field.

if i use varchar(X) it will always use X amount of space..

the data that have to be inserted in this field can vary from 10 bytes to few MBs..

this field i wants to store webpage data..

m confused abt an appropriate datatype for this field..

How can i do it?

Posted 14-Jul-12 9:39am

Harmanjeet Singh

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André Kraak · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-14T10:11:00

Quote: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176089.aspx[^]
varchar [ ( n | max ) ]

Variable-length, non-Unicode string data. n defines the string length and can be a value from 1 through 8,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB). The storage size is the actual length of the data entered + 2 bytes. The ISO synonyms for varchar are char varying or character varying.

So X in varchar(X) specifies the maximum length of the string that can be entered into the field; but it does not mean that X amount of space is always allocated per record. Only the space needed to store the string placed in the field is allocated.
In your case if you are storing more than 8000 characters use varchar(max).