help with general design of application

the web app that im creating will allow a user to input their email address,
and a "story" (for lack of a better term).

i have no way of knowing if this story will be 2 words or thousands of
characters. i imagine i would put some kind of limit on the field at some
point so that people couldnt go crazy, but my question is how best to store
this data?

im playing around with both SQL 2005 Express and Access for different
reasons, and from what I can see if I define a text field in Access its
limited to 255 characters. this wont be enough, so how would i want to do
this? is a database a good choice for storing this type of data? i guess i
could store only the email address in a database and then have a field that
points to a text file on the server that would store the "story", but i
would end up having a text file for every email address which might get
crazy...

whats the best way to do this?

Re: help with general design of application

ok so in Access i can have a memo field... :o)


but id still like opinions on how best to do this



"Jimmy" wrote in message
news:eoAlFN00GHA.4392@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> the web app that im creating will allow a user to input their email
> address, and a "story" (for lack of a better term).
>
> i have no way of knowing if this story will be 2 words or thousands of
> characters. i imagine i would put some kind of limit on the field at some
> point so that people couldnt go crazy, but my question is how best to
> store this data?
>
> im playing around with both SQL 2005 Express and Access for different
> reasons, and from what I can see if I define a text field in Access its
> limited to 255 characters. this wont be enough, so how would i want to do
> this? is a database a good choice for storing this type of data? i guess i
> could store only the email address in a database and then have a field
> that points to a text file on the server that would store the "story", but
> i would end up having a text file for every email address which might get
> crazy...
>
> whats the best way to do this?
>
>

Re: help with general design of application

In SQL2000, a varchar column can contain up to 8000 characters. In
SQL2005, a varchar(max) column can contain up to 2^31 - 1 characters. Is
that enough? if not, use a Text column.

Does SQL Books Online come with Express? if not, you can get them here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms130214.aspx

For strictly SQL database design questions, you will probably get more
help in a sqlserver newsgroup.


Jimmy wrote:
> ok so in Access i can have a memo field... :o)
>
>
> but id still like opinions on how best to do this
>
>
>
> "Jimmy" wrote in message
> news:eoAlFN00GHA.4392@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>> the web app that im creating will allow a user to input their email
>> address, and a "story" (for lack of a better term).
>>
>> i have no way of knowing if this story will be 2 words or thousands
>> of characters. i imagine i would put some kind of limit on the field
>> at some point so that people couldnt go crazy, but my question is
>> how best to store this data?
>>
>> im playing around with both SQL 2005 Express and Access for different
>> reasons, and from what I can see if I define a text field in Access
>> its limited to 255 characters. this wont be enough, so how would i
>> want to do this? is a database a good choice for storing this type
>> of data? i guess i could store only the email address in a database
>> and then have a field that points to a text file on the server that
>> would store the "story", but i would end up having a text file for
>> every email address which might get crazy...
>>
>> whats the best way to do this?

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