Knowledge is Power

Varchar means Variable-length Character string. Nvarchar will store Unicode characters.Both will be used all most for the same purpose but with little difference. Varchar will store the 8-bit data in database where as Nvarchar will be stored as 16-bit data in Database. In Sql server 2005 The size for a table page is 8,196 bytes, and no one row in a table can be more than 8,060 characters. This in turn limits the maximum size of a VARCHAR to 8,000 bytes. Varchar (MAX) and Nvarchar (MAX). Varchar (MAX) can hold max of 2,147,483,648 characters and NVARCHAR (MAX) can hold 1,073,741,823 characters. We use Varchar instead of TEXT and NTEXT which cannot be used to passed as variables in a stored procedure where as Varchar (MAX) or Nvarchar (MAX) cannot have such restriction. If you're in the process of migrating an existing data design for SQL Server 2005, it might make sense to migrate some TEXT / NTEXT fields to VARCHAR (MAX) / NVARCHAR (MAX) types when appropriate. If you need Unicode ...

I'd like to create a stored procedure that takes the name of table as a parameter, and then creates that table, if it doesn't exist, according to a schema stored somewhere. Is that possible-- Can I store a schema and use is as a template to create tables from? Or must I hard-code the CREATE TABLE and its scheme in the stored procedure itself? The idea here is to be able to change the schema without changing the stored procedure (separation of concerns), because I'm probably going to expand the procedure to do more. This is as far as I got without knowing whether to just hard-code the schema for the table in the sproc, or whether I can store and pull that schema somehow. CREATE PROCEDURE GenerateTable @tableName as nvarchar(128) AS BEGIN IF OBJECT_ID(@tableName,'U') IS NULL CREATE TABLE @tableName ???????? ENDIF END GO