>Hi,
>
>If you are sure that a 'text' field will never exceed the 8000 byte varchar limit, are you better served creating varchar fields than text fields? I ask only because they are easier to manipulate than text fields.
>
>What are pros/cons of each? Any "best practice " here? Does answer change if you know field will be less than 4K? <2K?, <1K, etc?
>
>TIA,

Text fields are TERRIBLE. A table that contains a text field:
a) Can not issue a Union Distinct - thus forcing you to use a Union All
and then use asp logic to remove extraneous rows (very slow),
b) You can not index that field. On really large tables indexes are
critical to fast performance via "where" clause and "order by" clause.

I have worked on an app with text fields and they created tremendous problems.

The same goes for "bit" and "image" data types.