Hello,

I'm writing this application that will allow a user to define custom quizzes and then allow another user to respond to the questions. Each question of the quiz has a corresponding datatype. All the responses to all the questions are stored vertically in my [Response] table. I currently use 2 fields to store the response.

//Response schema
ResponseID int
QuizPersonID int
QuestionID int
ChoiceID int //maps to Choice table, used for drop down lists
ChoiceValue varbinary(MAX) //used to store a user entered value

I'm using .net 3.5 C# SQL Server 2008.

I'm thinking that I would want to store different datatypes in the same field and then in my SQL report proc I would CONVERT to the proper datatype. I'm thinking this is ideal because I only have to check one field. I'm also thinking it might be more trouble than it is worth.

I think my other options are to; store the data as strings in the db (yuck), or to have a column for each datatype I might use.

So what I would like to know is, how would I format my datatypes in C# so that they can be converted properly in SQL? What is the performance hit for converting in SQL? Should I just make a whole wack of columns for each datatype?