What is 'type' in systypes?

Question

In sys.systypes ... what exactly is 'type'?

What exactly does .... bigint > int > varchar ... order mean when I execute

select * from sys.systypes order by type desc

Answer 1

Don't use sys.systypes. Use sys.types instead.

Catalog views like sys.sys% are for backward compatibility and there is always a newer, better explained catalog view. In this case, sys.types no longer exposes the internal physical storage type (the type) column, since that is an internal, undocumented, type id.