FieldSize Property
Returns the number of bytes used in the database (rather than in memory) of a Memo or Long Binary Field object in the Fields collection of a Recordset object.
Return Values
The return value is a Long that indicates the number of characters (for a Memo field) or the number of bytes (for a Long Binary field).
Remarks
You can use FieldSize with the AppendChunk and GetChunk methods to manipulate large fields.
Because the size of a Long Binary or Memo field can exceed 64K, you should assign the value returned by FieldSize to a variable large enough to store a Long variable.
To determine the size of a Field object other than Memo and Long Binary types, use the Size property.
Note In an ODBCDirect workspace, the FieldSize property is not available in the following situations:
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If the database server or ODBC driver does not support server-side cursors.
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If you are using the ODBC cursor library (that is, the DefaultCursorDriver property is set to dbUseODBC, or to dbUseDefault when the server does not support server-side cursors).
- If you are using a cursorless query (that is, the DefaultCursorDriver property is set to dbUseNoCursor).
For example, Microsoft SQL Server version 4.21 does not support server-side cursors, so the FieldSize property is not available.
The FieldSize property and the VBA Len() or LenB() functions may return different values as the length of the same string. Strings are stored in a Microsoft Jet database in multi-byte character set (MBCS) form, but exposed through VBA in Unicode format. As a result, the Len() function will always return the number of characters, LenB will always return the number of characters X 2 (Unicode uses two bytes for each character), but FieldSize will return some value in between if the string has any MBCS characters. For example, given a string consisting of three normal characters and two MBCS characters, Len() will return 5, LenB() will return 10, and FieldSize will return 7, the sum of 1 for each normal character and 2 for each MBCS character.