Our Forum Has Msgs &&> 8K

Hi,

Our website provide users with a forum where they can enter messages. So, typically, a user would enter a message, click submit, and their message would be displayed on the forum.

The db that stores these msgs uses a varchar field. Now, we're adding a facility to convert any urls that are entered to links by adding 'a href' tags, so that when users see messages with urls, those urls appear as links, and they can click on them. The problem is that if a user enters a message of 8K chars, then we add 'a href' tags to any urls they have, that makes the message length > 8K, preventing us from storing it in our db. (Please note that we do need to add HTML tags for other reasons as well, not just to convert urls to links.)

We thought about adding 'a href' tags during pre-render, thus avoiding storing html in the db, but found that doing such string manipulations, while a user is waiting to see their post displayed on the forum, was expensive. Timing tests revealed that the time to render such pages more than doubled.

I have solved such problems previously by adding an extra field in the db to store any overflow data, that is, data that appears after the first 8K chars.

However, I learnt of sql server 2005's varchar(max) datatype, and 'am wondering if the best way to solve this problem would be to replace the varchar field with varchar(max).

Thanks in advance for any advice.
Shefali