Dec 042008
I’m sure there are more posts like these to come, but I just wanted to get this out there. It’s been a small annoyance of mine that carried over from my MySQL days, but why aren’t there unsigned numerics in SQL Server?
Why do I have to waste a whole bit on the sign in IDENTITY columns, possibly causing me to choose a larger data type, doubling my storage requirements for that column from 4-byte INT to 8-byte BIGINT?
Can we get by with what we have now? Absolutely
Are there workarounds to emulate the behavior? Sorta
Would this be terribly difficult to implement? Doubtful
So whadyasay? Can we have native data type support for unsigned integers?