Structure of a Record which has a text column

Question

Hi, I have a record which I viewed using DBCC page command. Here is how it looks :-

Memory Dump @0x00E5C060

00000000:   30000800 01000000 02000001 001f8000 †0...............         
00000010:   00d10700 0000009a 00000001 000000††††...............          

Slot 0 Column 0 Offset 0x4 Length 4

col1 = 1                             

col2 = [Textpointer] Slot 0 Column 1 Offset 0xf Length 16

TextTimeStamp = 131137536            RowId = (1:154:0)     

Here col1 is of type int and col2 is of type ntext.
I know that ntext column values are stored in text page.

But I don't know how to interpret col2 info above ie

col2 = [Textpointer] Slot 0 Column 1 Offset 0xf Length 16

TextTimeStamp = 131137536            RowId = (1:154:0)    

Can anybody help me understand this? Thanks

Answer 1

col2 is a pointer to the BLOB allocation unit. The ntext column is on slot 0 on the page (1:154). You can DBCC dump the page 1:154 to find the content of the ntext column col2.

There is a more detailed example at http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2006/12/13/More-undocumented-fun_3A00_-DBCC-IND_2C00_-DBCC-PAGE_2C00_-and-off_2D00_row-columns.aspx

Answer 2

thanks for replying, "col2 = [Textpointer] Slot 0 Column 1 Offset 0xf Length 16"

00000000: 30000800 01000000 02000001 001f8000 †0...............
00000010: 00d10700 0000009a 00000001 000000††††...............

In this,its said that the length of info is 16. its equivalent hex values are : -

00 00d10700 0000009a 00000001 000000†††

i can find information about TextTimeStamp = 131137536 RowId = (1:154:0)

in the above hex values. But how can i find info that it is a text pointer

Moreover in another instance , i came accross [Inline Blob root] for an nvarchar datatype value.

heres how it looked

col6= [BLOB Inline Root] Slot 1 Column 38 Offset 0x16d Length 24

Level = 0 Unused = 0 UpdateSeq = 1 TimeStamp = 1969553408
Link 0

here if you notice the length is 24 in contrast to the previous instance (Text pointer) It has some additional information as well like update sequence is UpdateSeq = 1.

How can i differentiate between the two instance by looking at the sequence of bytes