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I am writing a basic DBMS package and I am trying to retrieve the column length. This is the query I am using to retrieve the infomation: 

SELECT COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE, CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'testVariables'

This works fine, no issues except for CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH returns -1 all the time, When I use SQL Management Studio it says the column length is 16...

Any ideas?

Cheers, Joel

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  • are you connecting with the same user? Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 11:07
  • I don't see any problem - for VARCHAR columns, it does return the proper length. What are you looking for? INT, DATETIME etc. fields do not have a maximum length - their length is a given, defined by their type Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 11:17

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Take a look at look at books online and you will discover that the value -1 for CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH means the data type is either XML of a large-value type.

See COLUMNS

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4 Comments

Hello, Thanks for the answer. I read that when researching why It was going wrong - but it should return the value 16 as the column is nVarchar(16) - or am I being thick? Cheers, Joel
I just created a test table with a column nVarchar(16) and it shows up correctly. Are you sure you're in the right database context. Or don't have 2 tables of that name in different schemas?
or the datatype is an INT, DATETIME etc. - just something that's nor (N)VARCHAR, nor (N)CHAR
Hey, yeah I think the problem was the way the table was defined, I will try delete and re-create the table. Cheers, Joel

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