Hi we run 2012 enterprise and to be proactive i thought i'd ask the community what the len function will return on our nvarchar(30) col when our foreign partners start populating with chars that really need to occupy 2 bytes per visible char.
I already see that len does an rtrim. That's interesting but let's say they send a col value that occupies all 30 display positions with characters that require 2 bytes each?
Why do i ask? First of all I see that our unicode data that contains chars that otherwise only require 1 byte count a fully populate column as len 30. But I see max length in sql's meta data = 60. And I will be applying the len function to this column in some of our etl and need to anticipate correctly the behavior that i will see under any condition including a mix of chars that would otherwise occupy 1 byte together with chars that require two bytes in storage.
Depending on the answer i may need to know from the community what function I would use to count visible chars instead of used bytes? Its the visible chars I really want to count.