Supported SQL Server datatypes

The SQL Native Client database interface supports the datatypes listed in Table 8-1.

**Table 8-1: Supported datatypes for Microsoft SQL Server 2005**
Binary	Real
Bit	SmallDateTime
Character (fewer than 255 characters)	SmallInt
DateTime	SmallMoney
Decimal	Text
Float	Timestamp
Identity	TinyInt
Image	VarBinary(max)
Int	VarBinary(n)
Money	VarChar(max)
Numeric	VarChar(n)
NVarChar(max)	XML
NVarChar(n)

The XML datatype is a built-in datatype in SQL Server 2005 that enables you to store XML documents and fragments in a SQL Server database. You can use this datatype as a column type when you create a table.

Additional datatypes are supported for SQL Server 2008. For more information, see “Support for new datatypes in SQL Server 2008”.

In SQL Server 2005, the VarChar(max), NVarChar(max), and VarBinary(max) datatypes store very large values (up to 2^31 bytes). You can use these datatypes to obtain metadata, define new columns, and query data from the columns. You can also use them to pipeline data.