FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

You heard it here first: Microsoft's documentation quality ranges from
pretty good to pretty awful.  If you want information on how to use their
library, it's pretty good.  If you want hard technical details, it gets
murky.  

I just came across this page, which I thought our little club might find
amusing.  I probably should have stopped when I learned that "Binary data
consists of hexadecimal numbers", but I couldn't help myself.  The
parenthetical explanations and reminders, the examples of binary data!  The
whole thing sounds like a C- paper by a 12 year old.  

If you can learn anything about what it's trying to tell you, you have my
sympathies.  

--jkl

Binary Data
Binary data consists of hexadecimal numbers. For example, the decimal number
245 is hexadecimal F5. Binary data is stored using the binary, varbinary,
and image data types in Microsoft® SQL Server(tm). A column that is assigned
the binary data type must have the same fixed length (up to 8 KB) for each
row. In a column that is assigned the varbinary data type, entries can vary
in the number of hexadecimal digits (up to 8 KB) they contain. Columns of
image data can be used to store variable-length binary data exceeding 8 KB,
such as Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and images
that include bitmaps, GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and JPEG (Joint
Photographic Experts Group) files.
In general, use varbinary for storing binary data, unless the length of the
data exceeds 8 KB, in which case you should use image. It is recommended
that the defined length of a binary column be no larger than the expected
maximum length of the binary data to be stored.



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