Does it improve performance to allow nulls in a TEXT field

• John F

  SSCommitted

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  February 11, 2005 at 6:01 pm

  #60693

  I have heard that that NULLS in VARCHAR fields can be a performance penalty (small), but I was wondering if the oposite were true for TEXT fields.  If my beliefe is that that the TEXT data is stored somewhere else from the data for the row, then it might be true that when the value of the TEXT is null MSSQL might not have to reference the other storage area at all.  Does anyone know more about this, or a good place for me to read up on NULLS in TEXT fields and NULLS in fields in general?

  thanks!

  - john

• Adam Machanic

  SSCoach

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  February 12, 2005 at 3:15 pm

  #541946

  Check out this link for my findings on that:

  http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/amachanic/archive/2004/10/22/4743.aspx

  --
  Adam Machanic
  whoisactive

• Frank Kalis

  SSC Guru

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  February 14, 2005 at 1:58 am

  #542001

  Also, see if this helps explaining further:

  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/sql/2000/all/reskit/en-us/part3/c1161.mspx

  --
  Frank Kalis
  Microsoft SQL Server MVP
  Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
  My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url]

• John F

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  February 14, 2005 at 12:37 pm

  #542140

  thanks to both of you!  Both of those articles were very helpful.