Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
You’re building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
2025-11-03
Data Storage
Identify Tables With Dropped Columns
How easily can we find tables with dropped columns that need cleanup?
2024-06-07
2,478 reads
Long Term Storage
Long term data storage isn't something we always need for databases, but it is something the world needs. A new technology has promise for those use cases, both in durability and preserving the algorithms needed.
2022-06-24
379 reads
Do We Care About Disks?
I ran across a tip on MSSQLTips from Joe Gavin recently, and it got me thinking about hardware and disks. For a lot of us, we deal with servers and storage, and not disks. While we might have a disk on a laptop or desktop, most of the production systems just attach to remote storage. […]
2021-11-03
291 reads
Storage 101: Welcome to the Wonderful World of Storage
Understanding all the storage options available to...
2019-12-30
SQL Server Storage Internals 101
This article is an extract from the book Tribal SQL. In this article, Mark S. Rasmussen offers a concise introduction to the physical storage internals behind SQL Server databases. He doesn't dive into every detail, but provides a simple, clear picture of how SQL Server stores data.
2013-10-21
3,767 reads
Blogs
Flyway Tips: AI Generating Migration Script Names
By Steve Jones
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how...
The Book of Redgate: Get the right stuff done
By Steve Jones
Another of our values: The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who...
Runing tSQLt Tests with Claude
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Forums
No Defaults Passwords Ever
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No Defaults Passwords Ever
Introduction of OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = ON
Hi, We have low latency high volume system. I have a table having 3...
The Long Name
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Long Name
Question of the Day
The Long Name
I run this code to create a table:
When I check the length, I get these results:
A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?