That makes perfect sense!

I was confused by the original statement

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Run DBCC PAGE again and you will find that new rows continue to take 2 bytes for Col1 (and not 1...

I do apologize as my question was not very clear.

I know what a "metadata" is, the question should have been "Why would the metadata (or catalog) definition be different...

For your first comment about reducing the field length from INT to SMALLINT, you said the change will take place only in the "metadata", what is a "metadata" and why...