SQL Data Types

The SQL data types are divided into five categories and that five categories have multiple properties to define a value for a table field.

SQL Data Types

• Character/String Data Types
• Numeric Data Types
• Date/Time Data Types
• Binary Data Types
• Miscellaneous Data Types

Character/String

Character/Strings are used to store strings like names, locations, etc., and even large text files.
With that, you can also store any HTML, CSS, js file content also.

Data Type	Description
CHAR	Maximum 8000 character long fixed length string
VARCHAR	Maximum 8000 character long variable length string
VARCHAR(max)	Maximum max character long variable length string
NCHAR	Unicode Maximum 8000 character long fixed length string
NVARCHAR	Unicode Maximum 8000 character long variable length string
NVARCHAR(max)	Unicode Maximum max character long variable length string
TEXT	Maximum 2GB sized variable length string

Numeric

Numeric SQL data types are used to store numeric or decimal numeric data, it can be very small numbers in a bit or tinyint or very large numbers in a bigint format.

Data Type	Minimum	Maximum
bit	0	1
tinyint	0	255
smallint	-32,768	32,767
int	-2,147,483,648	2,147,483,647
bigint	-9,223,372,036,854,775,808	9,223,372,036,854,775,807
decimal	-10^38 – 1	-10^38 – 1
real	-3.40E + 38	3.40E + 38
numeric	-10^38 +1	10^38 -1
float	-1.79E + 308	1.79E + 308

Date/Time

Date/Time data types are used to store data and time objects. Storing a date as a date/type object instead of a string can make it very easy to filter out data based on exact date and time where else date in string type u cannot achieve that.

Data Type	Description
Datetime	Date and Time stored in the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS format
Date	Date stored in the YYYY-MM-DD format
Time	Time stored in the HH:MI:SS format
Timestamp	Number of seconds passed stored since ‘1970-01-01 00:00:00’ UTC
Year	Year stored in 2-digit (from 1970-2069) or 4-digit (from 1901 2155) format

Binary

Binary data types are used to store data in its binary form, instead of storing it as strings, which can be a big factor in saving space.

Data Type	Description
BINARY	Maximum length of 8000 bytes fixed binary
VARBINARY	Maximum length of 8000 bytes variable binary
VARBINARY(max)	Maximum length of max bytes fixed binary
NTEXT	Maximum 2GB sized variable length binary

Miscellaneous

These data types are for special types of data as described below:

Data Type	Description
CLOB	Upto 2GB large character objects
BLOB	For storing binary large objects
JSON	For storing JSON objects
XML	For storing XML objects