Open Table in SQL Server 2005 is replaced by “Edit Top 200 Rows” in SQL Server 2008. You can change that command in the Tools > Options > SQL Server Object Explorer > Commands.

But once you right-click a table, choose “Edit Top 200 Rows”, hunt on the toolbar for a button called “Show SQL Pane”. From here you can edit the query so the grid shows a subset of the data that you want.

The reason for this change is because people were accidentally opening huge tables with the old Open Table command.

For SQL server, if you have a choice between varchar vs nvarchar, always use nvarchar.

You may never need the double-byte characters for most applications. However, if you need to support double-byte languages and you only have single-byte support in your database schema it’s really expensive to go back and modify throughout your application.

The cost of migrating one application from varchar to nvarchar will be much more than the little bit of extra disk space you’ll use in most applications.