Access memory buffers

[tdion]

"When a field in Access is declared to 255 characters for a text field, are memory buffers of 255 bytes created for that table when it is opened? Is there any real advantage to truncating the text fields to a smaller size than 255, or is there potential for memory overusage if all text fields are set to 255?"

 

[jason246day]

I believe that Access stores them by characters, and does not allocate out the maximum amount of space that can be used.

So to answer your question, no it shouldn't matter if you truncate or not.

 

[BNPMike]

Here is my guess. When you open a table you will get a number of pages loaded into your buffer space. I assume it is zero to start with. Jet holds character data (in its files) in a space which is related to the length of the data and not the defined length of the field. I doubt Access 'opens' out the data when it gets into memory.

When a page is actually being processed by Access eg in a datasheet control then who knows - but the point I'm making is most of your bufferring will be to do with pages sucked across from the database, so I don't think declaring a 255 character field for 10 character data would make a lot of difference.