Miscellaneous Data Types in SQL Server 2008

Here, I’m going to discuss miscellaneous data types in SQL Server 2008. We can organize the miscellaneous data types in the following 7 types:

Cursor: Used to create a recordset by SQL Server, which is primarily used as OUTPUT parameter to a stored procedure.

HierarchyID: It is system data type and variable-length. It is primarily used to represent position in a hierarchy. This is very useful data type when pulling the data out for hierarchical analysis.

Sql_Variant: This stores values of various SQL Server supported data types. This data type has been introduced to cater advanced and complex database design issues.

Table: It is used to stored a result set or rows and manipulate later on. This has been introduced to counter cursor data type, which, in most cases, degrades performance.

Timestamp: Is a data type that exposes automatically generated, unique binary numbers within a database. rowversion is generally used as a mechanism for version-stamping table rows. The storage size is 8 bytes. The rowversion data type is just an incrementing number and does not preserve a date or a time. To record a date or time, use a datetime2 data type.

Uniqueidentifier: It is a 16-byte GUID. There are two ways to initialize a variable of this data type. It is always unique across SQL Server instance.

XML: It stores XML type of data.