Quantifying the data model
There are a number of reasons for discussing the SQL Server data type system in the amount of detail we did. In this section, we will look closer into the importance of properly choosing data types. We will have a look at the following:
- Data quality
- Query functionality
- Performance
- Database size
We discussed data quality and query functionality in the previous section. You cannot accidentally store text in a numerical column or store a string that looks like a date but isn't a valid date in a date column. Also, storing numbers as numerical data provides you with the ability to perform computations with the data.
It should also be clear from the previous section that the data types you choose have a big impact on the query performance of your database.
In the next section, we are going to provision an Azure SQL database. To do so, we need to know (roughly) how big our database is going to be. We probably also want to know...