So I've recently encountered an issue with some of my users where they have a limitation on a number of characters they have in an input text box right now that is set to 800 chars and I've gotten complaints about people needing more space.
Now note - I don't want to see these areas also get spammed with people who want to write memoirs and their life stories here either.
I'm thinking I either need to make it clear that whatever it is their writing in there needs be shortened out OR I need to create some sort of Facebook-chat-like area where they are limited to 800 chars but can enter multiple entries into the system?
But I'm not sure if doing that chart-like set up is really db costly or not? Or should I just up the text area to be twice as long?
If you bump up your limit of character but stay within a limit that sql server allows you to create indexes on that column, you should not see any massive performance hit.
If you make your column VARCHAR(8000) or NVARCHAR(4000) sql server will allow you to index those columns.
On a side note yes allowing more text will result in sql server having to process more data. Now whether you decide to let sql server process more rows with less data or more data with less rows, this is something you would need to test and compare the results, to see which one suits you best.