Note I have updated the question with more info to explain why it is not a duplicate. Changes are in italics below.  I'm pretty new to Salesforce but come from a .NET/Sql Server background. So I am trying to understand how data is allocated in a Salesforce database (especially so since the standard size allocated to a database is really small compared to what I am used to.)  Basically what I want is a field in a table that is a textual description. It is something that the user can type in various notes, consequently, most of the time it is very short, a few dozen characters, but other times it can be extremely long -- 10,000 characters for example. I don't want to create a field that is 10,000 characters long, since that will quickly consume all the space.  n the databases I am used to you would create a field with a type where the space is shared -- varchar(max). These fields essentially have a big shared buffer of space so that each field is small but there is a large shared space that the field points in to.  I don't see anything like that in Salesforce, and, since it is such a common requirement, I was wondering what people recommend as the best approach to this so that I am not wasting loads of space for big, mostly empty fields.  Please note, this has been suggested as a duplicate -- however, my question refers to custom tables not the standard built in tables (as referenced in the putative duplicate.) How is the space calculated for a custom table. For example, if I want to store a table of "Notes" where are free form notes that can be any length from 0 to 20,000 characters. I don't want every row to take up 20,000 characters since most are very much shorter.  I hope this clarifies my question, and I thank you in advance for your help.
My company has recently exceeded our data storage cap (at 102% right now.. :/ ).  A large portion of the data that pushed us over our limit was due to an import of records.  The weird thing about this is that the records only had a couple of fields populated each out of the 200 total fields on the object.  What this tells me is that SalesForce holds the space for each field (since it knows the max-length of each field) rather than populating space only when the field is not null.  Does anyone know if this is the case?  To reiterate, and perhaps present this question more clearly:  If a field has a max character count of 1,000 and only 250 of those characters are actually being used, does SalesForce count the total data storage consumed by that field as 250 or 1,000?
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