I need to store and retrieve ten fields of 16-bits each for testing 16 true-false conditions (a total of 160 bits in each record) so I think I'd like to use ten 2-byte binary fields (160 "bit" fields would be quite unmanageble, if even possible [I think there is some kind of limit to the number of fields in a single record]).
I'm not quickly finding in the SQL Server's online documentation how to test for, use and update binary fields. I'll keep looking, but can anyone point me in the right direction? I'm using VB, if that makes any difference.
The post below is from SQL Server BOL (books online) documentation on BIT, BINARY and VARBINARY data types. I am assuming you know BIT is proprietry because of three valued logic there is no Boolean data type in ANSI SQL. If you need more information post again. Hope this helps.
bit
Integer data type 1, 0, or NULL.
Remarks
Columns of type bit cannot have indexes on them.
Microsoft? SQL Server? optimizes the storage used for bit columns. If there are 8 or fewer bit columns in a table, the columns are stored as 1 byte. If there are from 9 through 16 bit columns, they are stored as 2 bytes, and so on.
binary and varbinary
Binary data types of either fixed-length (binary) or variable-length (varbinary).
binary [ ( n ) ]
Fixed-length binary data of n bytes. n must be a value from 1 through 8,000. Storage size is n+4 bytes.
varbinary [ ( n ) ]
Variable-length binary data of n bytes. n must be a value from 1 through 8,000. Storage size is the actual length of the data entered + 4 bytes, not n bytes. The data entered can be 0 bytes in length. The SQL-92 synonym for varbinary is binary varying.
Remarks
When n is not specified in a data definition, or variable declaration statement, the default length is 1. When n is not specified with the CAST function, the default length is 30.
Use binary when column data entries are consistent in size.
Use varbinary when column data entries are inconsistent in size.
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