Jon Morisi looks at an oddity with the way that sp_help shows column length:
I was working with a contractor today who was having difficulty providing me back details on a table definition. I was specifically interested in a particular column’s data type and size. (This was related to an ETL process I was working on, and my desire to avoid any implicit conversions).
The reply I got back was, “the column you’re interested in is an nvarchar(100)”. After continued digging and troubleshooting, I was eventually able to sort out that it was actually an nvarchar(50).
I put together this TEST table to illustrate where the confusion came from. Can you spot what’s going on?
There’s an interesting explanation which makes me dislike sp_help just a little bit more.