We are developing an Intranet for our organization and are using SQL 7.0 as the database for it. We have a content table with a field to hold the text for the various html pages. Can somebody explain to me the difference between the text and ntext datatypes? Which is better to use for storing web page content? Also, what is the difference between varchar and nvarchar? I couldn't seem to find any clear-cut explanation of the differences.
Thanks
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Using Unicode Data
The Unicode specification defines a single encoding scheme for most characters widely used in businesses around the world. All computers consistently translate the bit patterns in Unicode data into characters using the single Unicode specification. This ensures that the same bit pattern is always converted to the same character on all computers. Data can be freely transferred from one database or computer to another without concern that the receiving system will translate the bit patterns into characters incorrectly.
One problem with data types that use 1 byte to encode each character is that the data type can only represent 256 different characters. This forces multiple encoding specifications (or code pages) for different alphabets such as European alphabets, which are relatively small. It is also impossible to handle systems such as the Japanese Kanji or Korean Hangul alphabets that have thousands of characters.
Each Microsoft® SQL Server™ collation has a code page that defines what patterns of bits represent each character in char, varchar, and text values. Individual columns and character constants can be assigned a different code page. Client computers use the code page associated with the operating system locale to interpret character bit patterns. There are many different code pages. Some characters appear on some code pages, but not on others. Some characters are defined with one bit pattern on some code pages, and with a different bit pattern on other code pages. When you build international systems that must handle different languages, it becomes difficult to pick code pages for all the computers that meet the language requirements of multiple countries. It is also difficult to ensure that every computer performs the correct translations when interfacing with a system using a different code page.
The Unicode specification addresses this problem by using 2 bytes to encode each character. There are enough different patterns (65,536) in 2 bytes for a single specification covering the most common business languages. Because all Unicode systems consistently use the same bit patterns to represent all characters, there is no problem with characters being converted incorrectly when moving from one system to another. You can minimize character conversion issues by using Unicode data types throughout your system.
In Microsoft SQL Server, these data types support Unicode data:
nchar
nvarchar
ntext
Note The n prefix for these data types comes from the SQL-92 standard for National (Unicode) data types.
Use of nchar, nvarchar, and ntext is the same as char, varchar, and text, respectively, except that:
Unicode supports a wider range of characters.
More space is needed to store Unicode characters.
The maximum size of nchar and nvarchar columns is 4,000 characters, not 8,000 characters like char and varchar.
Unicode constants are specified with a leading N: N'A Unicode string'.
All Unicode data uses the same Unicode code page. Collations do not control the code page used for Unicode columns, only attributes such as comparison rules and case sensitivity.
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by: namasi_navaretnamPosted on 2003-10-29 at 07:30:30ID: 9642605
ntext - for internaltional applications (japanese, chinese characters). Takes 2bytes per charatcer.
text - non-unicode characters.
ntext, text, and image
Fixed and variable-length data types for storing large non-Unicode and Unicode character and binary data. Unicode data uses the UNICODE UCS-2 character set.
ntext
Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum length of 230 - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters. Storage size, in bytes, is two times the number of characters entered. The SQL-92 synonym for ntext is national text.
text
Variable-length non-Unicode data in the code page of the server and with a maximum length of 231-1 (2,147,483,647) characters. When the server code page uses double-byte characters, the storage is still 2,147,483,647 bytes. Depending on the character string, the storage size may be less than 2,147,483,647 bytes.
image
Variable-length binary data from 0 through 231-1 (2,147,483,647) bytes.
HTH