I had thought that maybe the variable length was causing the fragmentation as well. The status column values range from 5 to 12 characters. In my test table, I ran...

The tests I ran did not include shrinking the database.

The size of the table varies from a few hundred thousand to 20 million.

The test I ran involved creating a...

Thank you for the suggestions. I had just finished coding and sanity testing your second suggestion when I got your reply. Your first option adds additional overhead to a process...

I am actually trying to achieve both and thought of extending the field definitions but would prefer to explore other options.

I saw that in Sybase there is STRING_RTRUNCATION setting that...

In both scenarios, is there a way for it to error if the XML value exceeds the column definition? For example, debt_id turns out to be 35 characters and not...