Interview Question of the Week #002 – Script to Find Byte Size of a Row for All the Tables in Database

In recent times I was part of the interview panel where I was stunned to see that following question was asked to interviewee. I personally believed that this question is no longer relevant as we are in the age where database are capable to handle large amount of data and the row size is no more significant. However, the question was still asked and the interviewee has to still answer it with regards to the latest version of SQL Server. Here it goes:

Question: How to find total row size in bytes for any table in SQL Server?

Answer: In SQL Server 2000 and earlier version it was crucial to know that byte size of the row as there was limit to how big a row can be. This limit has been removed in the recent versions of SQL Server so this question is no more relevant now.

Here is the script for recent versions of SQL Server. I have an additional column which indicates that if a table contains any column with datatype MAX.

SELECT
CASE WHEN (GROUPING(sob.name)=1) THEN 'All_Tables'
ELSE ISNULL(sob.name, 'unknown') END AS Table_name,
SUM(scol.max_length) AS Approx_Max_Length,
CASE WHEN MIN(scol.max_length) = -1 THEN 'Yes'
ELSE 'No' END AS Fieldwith_MAX_Datatype
FROM sys.objects sob
INNER JOIN sys.columns scol ON scol.OBJECT_ID=sob.OBJECT_ID
WHERE sob.TYPE='U'
GROUP BY sob.name
WITH CUBE          

If you are using SQL Server 2000, here is the blog post which contains the answer SQL SERVER – Query to Find ByteSize of All the Tables in Database.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)