Hi RuthMcKeown15 - you're right, this is a valid issue for companies providing professional services. Another issue is the length of Item names - currently a maximum of 30 characters (29 if importing data via Excel). Whilst generally adequate, this is too small for some industries - such as automotive. Public hospitals with mainframe inventory systems have had problems with long drug names or where dosage instructions have to be included, for different patients - e.d. adult and child. Sometimes, a pharmacy system drug name, that's too short, has resulted in serious accidental drug overdoses.
The reason for short fields for item names and descriptions is performance and cost.
Modern data field lengths are usually 16 or 32 characters, though sometimes 64.
Longer field lengths slow down data processing - so 32 or 64 length fields need need a fast processor, that's usually more expensive. Also they need more data storage space - though this cost has been reducing, as 1 terrabyte drives become more common.
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