title: SQL Server 2012 large table column performance
body: <p>I'm a report analyst and "newbie" to SQL Server. I have a view joining 2 tables with 100 columns - 50 are <code>NVARCHAR(255) Null</code> default, all others are <code>int</code> or <code>float</code>.  </p>
  
  <p>Table can go up to 1 million rows and performance is horrible when extracting the data using SQL Server, takes an hour and runs out of memory. Most of my <code>NVARCHAR(255)</code> are actually limited to 10 &amp; 50 bytes in the originating table so 255 not needed. Excluding any SQL join issues, is there any performance benefit to reducing the column sizes of the 50 to their true limits? </p>
  
  <p>I have seen varying data in the forum for this: some articles indicate I'd get some page size performance benefit by reducing this so data is "IN-ROW".  </p>
  
  <p>Conversely I've read where the <code>NVARCHAR(255)</code> only extracts the actual data size of 10 or 50 therefre this cannot be causing performance issue.  </p>
  
  <p>Please help? </p>
  
  <p>Thank you all!</p>
  
  <p>Rebelle</p>