Category: ASE: Datatypes

ASE Datatypes

With the help of datatypes one can determine which kind of data, which size and which storage format columns in a table can have, as well as the parameters in stored procedures and their local variables. In Sybase ASE (Adaptive Server® Enterprise) there are several datatypes available. ASE offers the complete range of ANSI-standard compatible datatypes and above that datatypes in T-SQL. The following is a list of datatypes available in ASE.

• Exact Numeric Datatypes; for numeric values with predictable accuracy.
• Approximate Numeric Datatypes; Decimal datatypes - for numeric values with accuracy depending on calculation.
• Money Datatypes; For amounts of money.
• Datetime Datatypes; For date and time values.
• Binary Datatypes; For raw data like images or sound data or bits.
• User Defined Datatypes; Datatypes set up by database users.

Note: ASE will cut off every data that exceeds the defined length of a specific datatype without prior warning, e.g. when doing inserts. If warnings should be raised, this can be turned on using the set command string_truncation on. Empty strings, e.g. "" (i.e. empty quotes) or ’’ (i.e. two apostrophes), will be stored as a single blank character. That is why "abc" + "" + "DEF" is not equal to "abcDEF", but "abc DEF".

See also:

bigint,
Binary Datatypes,
binary(),
bit,
date,
datetime,
Datetime Datatypes,
decimal,
double precision,
Exact Numeric Datatypes,
float,
image,
int,
money,
Money Datatypes,
nchar,
numeric,
nvarchar,
real,
smalldatetime,
smallint,
smallmoney,
strtobin(),
text,
time,
tinyint,
unichar(n),
univarchar(n),
User Defined Datatypes,
varbinary(n),
varchar(n).