Question

For example, a website offers the ability to create mobile surveys. Each survey ID is a FK in the survey response table, which contains ALL of the survey responses.

What is the size limitation of this table in a SQL Server 2008 db, if the table contains, say 20 varchar(255) fields including the bigint PK & FK?

I realize this would depend on the file size limitation as well, but I would like some more of an educated answer rather than my guess on this.

In terms of searchability, some fields that contain geo-related details such as the survey ID, city, state, and two commends fields would have to be searchable, and thus indexed … index only these fields?

Also, aged responses would expire after a given amount of time – thus deleted from the table. Does the table, at this point being very large, need to be re-indexed/cleaned up, after the deletions (which would be an automated process)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Maximum Capacity Specifications for SQL Server

Bytes per row: 8,060
Rows per table: Limited by available storage

Note

SQL Server supports row-overflow storage which enables variable length
columns to be pushed off-row. Only a 24-byte root is stored in the
main record for variable length columns pushed out of row; because of
this, the effective row limit is higher than in previous releases of
SQL Server. For more information, see the “Row-Overflow Data Exceeding
8 KB” topic in SQL Server Books Online