Column Size

From what I understand there is not a function or script available to
determine the row size of a table containing variable width columns.
Specifically I have a text column and was trying to determine the size of
the data being inserted, for each specific row.
I see the DATALENGTH function but that is returning the length in bytes,
not the size in bytes.
What if I ran a query in DTS to export the data in the column to a text
file, say "select messagebody from ifsmessages where messageid = 433"?
Would the size of the text file indicate the size stored in the column?
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Message posted via http://www.sqlmonster.comRobert Richards via SQLMonster.com wrote:
> I see the DATALENGTH function but that is returning the length in
> bytes, not the size in bytes.
The length is the size, pretty much. You could use datalength to add up
all the lengths across all columns for a given row to estimate the row
size. There is some row byte overhead depending on how columns are
defined.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/createdb/cm_8_des_02_92k3.asp
David Gugick
Imceda Software
www.imceda.com