I understand there are multiple questions about this on SO, but I have yet to find a definitive answer of "yes, here's how..."

So here it is again: What are the possible ways to store an unsigned integer value (32-bit value or 32-bit bitmap) into a 4-byte field in SQL Server?

Here are ideas I have seen:

1) Use a -1*2^31 offset for all values

• Disadvantages: need to perform math on the values before reading/writing/aggregating.

2) Use 4 tinyint fields

• Disadvantages: need to concatenate values to perform any operations

3) Use binary(4)

• Disadvantages: actually uses 4 + 2 bytes of space