Okay. You can find out how many characters are in a string. Can we also count the number of bytes in a string?

Yes! T-SQL uses the DATALENGTH() function to do that. It has only one parameter: the column name. DATALENGTH() returns the number of bytes in the value stored in this field. It is similar to the LEN() function, but DATALENGTH() can be used with any data type; LEN() only works with text. Another difference is that DATALENGTH() returns the number of bytes, while LEN() returns the number of characters.

Let's start with finding out how many bytes occupy each Id and Text value in the Slogan table.

SELECT
  DATALENGTH(Id) AS IdLength,
  DATALENGTH(Text) AS TextLength
FROM Slogan;

As you can see, each value in the Text column takes a different amount of bytes, while all Ids have the same. The longer text occupies more bytes, while the shorter text occupies fewer bytes.