Concerns about possible wasted storage space

[Brad]

Back in the good old days (1970s – punch card era) we had to be concerned
about every byte of storage space we used (disk, tape, cards, data cell,
etc.) Disk drives were very expensive at the time. Fortunately, the cost of
storing data has come down dramatically.

I have worked with IBM mainframes for many years. Recently I have started
to work with Access-2007 which I find to be an amazing software product.

Because of my background, I still think about storage space a bit, even
though I know that the cost of disk drives is very small. Here is my
question. If I define a Text field in Access-2007 to be 200 bytes long and I
only have 10 characters of data, am I wasting 190 bytes? Is there any type
of “compression†available?

I am not concerned about the cost of disk storage, but I am a little
concerned about the 2 GB limit per Access database and I am a bit concerned
about the traffic on the network with several people using the Access
application system.

Thanks in advance for your help with this question.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Text fields take only as much space as required for the data. In other
words, a text field containing 10 characters will only consume 20 bytes
(unless Unicode compression is turned on, in which case it's consume 10
bytes)

 

[Jerry Whittle]

As Doug said, space isn't wasted in Access. In fact most modern DBMS don't
waste space unless you force them to with something like using a CHAR data
type in Oracle instead of a VCHAR data type which is variable in length.