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Does any one has an idea of whats the best practice to store an unknown data type in a table. Basically I would need to store types like bit, smallint, int, real and nvarchar in the same "value" column, for later interpretation by a .NET application.
I was trying to achieve the best possible solution not to compromise the performance or growth of the database.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!
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You can use these SQL data types to store alphanumeric data: CHAR and NCHAR data types store fixed-length character literals. VARCHAR2 and NVARCHAR2 data types store variable-length character literals. NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 data types store Unicode character data only.
Databases use a special value called NULL to represent missing information.
NULL indicates that the value is unknown. A null value is different from an empty or zero value. No two null values are equal.
Varchar(max) is probably the easiest way to do this.
sql_variant was designed for this purpose so you could use it, but read the Books Online entry to ensure it's going to do what you want.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181071.aspx
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