Written by Mark Tse, Senior Software Developer, Platform Development D2L
Originally published Aug 13, 2020
As part of our documentation improvements, we plan to align all column data types in our Brightspace Data Sets (BDS) documentation and ERD diagrams to SQL Server data types in 20.20.10. This should help provide a more consistent experience in the documentation across all BDS categories.
Please note that this does not change the data sets themselves. Only the documentation will be changed. No changes to your integrations and/or tooling are required in response to this documentation change.
As an added bonus, ERD diagrams will be updated to include precision and/or storage size information. For example, instead of simply noting that a column is nvarchar in the ERD, you will now see the storage size as well (e.g. nvarchar(256)).
Figure 1: the ERD diagram on the left only shows the data type, while the ERD diagram on the right also shows the storage size
Here is a list of all the changes that will be converted to their equivalent SQL Server data type:
Current Data Type | New Data Type |
|---|
Boolean | bit |
Numeric | decimal |
String | nvarchar |
Where applicable, there will also be updates to some columns to better describe its data type:
Current Data Type | Possible New Data Type |
|---|
Int | smallint |
nvarchar | uniqueidentifier |
Note that the new data types in this case are a subset of the current data type. This means no schema changes are required for your data stores, although you may want to make changes to better optimize space and/or better describe the column.
The Version column is a special column that exists in multiple data sets used to compare two versions of a row with the same primary key. This is important when deciding if you should import two rows that differ in value, which is commonly done during an import of a differential data set. Moving forward, this column will be labelled as a bigint instead of Timestamp or TimeStamp, as bigint is the data type used in practice.
