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aiken
Aged Yak Warrior
525 Posts |
 Posted - 2004-08-30 : 13:14:38
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| Ok, something's bugging me. How, exactly, does SQL server store NULLs? It seems to me that if you had a table with a single tinyint column and 100 rows, it should be 100 bytes. Likewise, a table with a single INT column and 256 rows should be 1K.However, NULLs should throw all of that off. Byte columns have 257 possible values, smallints have 65537 possible values, ints have 4,294,967,297 possible values -- all one more than the datatype should hold in the number of bytes assigned to it.So how does that work?Cheers-b |
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess
38200 Posts |
Posted - 2004-08-30 : 14:10:08
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| http://www.nigelrivett.net/PageStructure.htmlTara |
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aiken
Aged Yak Warrior
525 Posts |
Posted - 2004-08-30 : 17:37:27
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| Bless you. Essentially, one bitmapped byte per row indicating which columns in that row are null. Hence, the 255 column per table limitation (or if not "hence," then at least "similarly,").Cheers-b |
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SQL server storage Q