Should I worry about running out of HierarchyIDs?
- by Bruno Martinez
When you ask for a new HierarchyID between two others, the result gets progressively longer. For example, between 2/5.6 and 2/5.7 there's only 2/5.6.1 and other 4 component paths. The HierarchyID data type is limited to 800 some bytes, so you can't repeat this forever. Then again, integer types are also limited, but it isn't a problem in practice. Should I periodically defragment my table so that height doesn't grow unbounded?