Question

In SQL Server 2008, consider the table

create table myTable (id int, filler char(X)) with (data_compression = Y)

where X is an integer of varying size, and Y is either “row”, “page” or “none”. In an experiment, I would like to specify X and Y programatically in T-SQL, so that I can measure a number of performance metrics for a large (!) amount of different (X,Y) pairs.

However, the following is not allowed:

declare @mySize int = 100
create table myTable (id int, filler char(@mySize)) ...

How can I then specify the char width and compression type programatically?

Answer 1

You could use dynamic SQL, for example:

declare @sql varchar(max)
set @sql = 'create table myTable (id int, filler char(' + 
    cast(@X as varchar(12)) + ')) with (compression = ' + @Y + ')'
exec (@sql)