All DBA and Developers must have observed when any variable length column is dropped from table, it does not reduce the size of table. Table size stays the same till Indexes are reorganized or rebuild. There is also DBCC command DBCC CLEANTABLE, which can be used to reclaim any space previously occupied with variable length columns. Variable length columns include varchar, nvarchar, varchar(max), nvarchar(max), varbinary, varbinary(max), text, ntext, image, sql_variant, and xml. Space can be reclaimed when variable length column is also modified to lesser length.