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Will empty string take up more space?
Message
From
22/10/2004 06:35:17
 
 
To
22/10/2004 01:12:37
Km Kwun
Eastop Consultants Limited
Nt, Hong Kong
General information
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Category:
Databases,Tables, Views, Indexing and SQL syntax
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
00953619
Message ID:
00953666
Views:
22
If you have one or more field nullable, VFP add hidden field (1 byte lenght) to the record structure.
Then use null use one byte ( space is very small ) and one field ( this is more restrictive ).

But, you don't hesitate: use NULL, any other choice it is mistaken.

A little ex.:
CLEAR
CREATE CURSOR C1 (F1 i NOT null,f2 m NOT NULL)
FOR K=1 TO 10000
APPEND BLANK
NEXT
? RECSIZE(),HEADER()+RECCOUNT()*RECSIZE()

CREATE CURSOR C1 (F1 i null,f2 m NOT NULL)
FOR K=1 TO 10000
APPEND BLANK
NEXT
? RECSIZE(),HEADER()+RECCOUNT()*RECSIZE()

CREATE CURSOR C1 (F1 i null,f2 m NULL)
FOR K=1 TO 10000
APPEND BLANK
NEXT
? RECSIZE(),HEADER()+RECCOUNT()*RECSIZE()

CREATE CURSOR C1 (F1 i null,f2 m NULL DEFAULT NULL)
FOR K=1 TO 10000
APPEND BLANK
NEXT
? RECSIZE(),HEADER()+RECCOUNT()*RECSIZE()

CREATE CURSOR C1 (F1 i NULL  DEFAULT NULL,f2 m NULL DEFAULT NULL)
FOR K=1 TO 10000
APPEND BLANK
NEXT
? RECSIZE(),HEADER()+RECCOUNT()*RECSIZE()
>My app will connect to either a VFP database or a SQL server (switchable by changing an INI file). I have set the TEXT field in SQL, mapping to a MEMO field in VFP, "not nullable" and default to an empty string. I think this is a better choice over setting the TEXT field nullable and default to NULL since code for both VFP and SQL backend will be easier to be kept the same.
>
>What I understand is a TEXT field is a pointer to actual information. May question is will defaulting a TEXT field to an empty string (real value) take up more space than defaulting it to Null (no value).
>
>TIA
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