Specifications

120 CHAPTER 6 Scalable Data Warehousing
In addition, you can use a CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement to create a table from the
results of a SELECT statement. You might use this technique when you are redistributing or
defragmenting a table.
Here is an example of the syntax for a CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement:
CREATE TABLE DimCustomer
WITH
( CLUSTERED INDEX (CustomerID) )
AS
SELECT * FROM DimCustomer;
Another option for creating tables is the CREATE REMOTE TABLE statement, which you
can use to export a table to a non-appliance SQL Server database in an SMP architecture. To
use this statement, you must ensure that the target database is available on the appliance’s
InniBand network.
Data Types
Many SQL Server data types supported by SQL Server 2008 are also supported by Parallel
Data Warehouse. Character and binary strings are supported, but you must limit the string
length to 8,000 characters. Another point to note is that Parallel Data Warehouse uses only
Latin1_General_BIN2 collation.
The following data types are supported:
■
Binary and varbinary
■
Bit
■
Char and varchar
■
Date
■
Datetime and datetime2
■
Datetimeoffset
■
Decimal
■
Float and real
■
Int, bigint, smallint, and tinyint
■
Money and smallmoney
■
Nchar and nvarchar
■
Smalldatetime
■
Time