title: How are varchar values stored in a SQL Server database?
body: <p>My fellow programmer has a strange requirement from his team leader; he insisted on creating <code>varchar</code> columns with a length of 16*2<sup>n</sup>.</p>
  
  <p>What is the point of such restriction?</p>
  
  <p>I can suppose that short strings (less than 128 chars for example) a stored directly in the record of the table and from this point of view the restriction will help to align fields in the record, larger strings are stored in the database "heap" and only the reference to this string is saved in the table record.</p>
  
  <p>Is it so? </p>
  
  <p>Is this requirement has a reasonable background?</p>
  
  <p>BTW, the DBMS is SQL Server 2008.</p>