Thanks for the response Michael,

Let me analyze the 2 major points that you made.

"The more space that a row takes up, the less rows that SQL Server will be able to place on an 8K page. This means that SQL Server will have to do more I/O to retrieve the data"

If I understand correctly then this really wouldn't have much effect on what I'm doing since I already have a bunch of fields that are big so what having another field that is big (when I mean big, probably my limit for the primary key would be 25 characters) is just normal.

"In your example, if cStatus_ID has a clustered index on it, the key will automatically become part of any non-clustered index that you create on the table, making the non-clustered key larger so that there are less keys on any one page."

I think I need to take a look at this, so what you're saying is that the non-clustered keys will be slower? or maybe noticibly slower?


Thanks.