SQL SERVER – Deprecated DataType vardecimal

I received following email yesterday from Satnam Singh- Computer Programmer from Bangalore. He asked why I had never written about vardecimal.

“Dear Pinal,

Congratulations for being MVP. You truely deserved it.

I wonder why have you never written newly introduced feature of vardecimal.

Keep up good work!

Satnam Singh
Developer – Bangalore.”

In SQL Server 2005 SP2 they have introduced new concept of vardecimal, which reduces the size of zero and null values. Generically vardecimal values ranges upto 20 bytes in storage place, however when zero or null values are used it reduces the values to only 2 bytes, this way it saves valuable storage place.

This feature is now being deprecated in SQL Server 2008 and new concept of “Row Compression” is introduced. Row compression is not only apples to zero and null but it includes many more datatypes like int, decimal, money, datetime etc. Another thing about row compression is now when zero and null values are stored they do not take up any space at all.

As I see the life span of vardecimal datatype very small I decided not to blog about it earlier. Let me know if you want me to write about “Row Compression” feature more.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.