I'm setting up a control table in SQL, that I plan to pull into memory and use as a DataTable.

I'm declaring some of the fields in the table as varchar.

In SQL, I know I can err on the size of making the field too large, because SQL won't pad out the values.

Question: How is the size of this field handled in a DataTable in memory?

That is, if I make a field varchar(500), instead of varchar(250), will it take up the full 500 bytes in memory in the Datatable?

Or will DataTable memory management only use the space needed to hold the actual characters in the field?

Any guidance on this would be appreciated.

Thanks!