In SQL server 2005 new datatypes were introduced: varchar(max) and nvarchar(max) They have the advantages of the old text type: they can contain op to 2GB of data, but they also have most of the advantages of varchar and nvarchar. Among these advantages are the ability to use string manipulation functions such as substring().

Sep 26, 2008 · In SQL Server, BLOBs can be text, ntext, or image data type, you can use the text type. text . Variable-length non-Unicode data, stored in the code page of the server, with a maximum length of 231 - 1 (2,147,483,647) characters.

May 7, 2009 · VarChar(MAX) is the suggested data type for storing large string values instead of the TEXT data type. In-Row or Out-of-Row Storage; Data of a TEXT type column is stored out-of-row in a separate LOB data pages. The row in the table data page will only have a 16 byte pointer to the LOB data page where the actual data is present.

If you're able to convert the column, you might as well, since the text data type will be removed in a future version of SQL Server. See here. The recommendation is to use varchar(MAX) or nvarchar(MAX). In your case, you could also use the XML data type, but that may tie you to certain database engines (if that's a consideration).

Mar 3, 2016 · VARCHAR(MAX) is big enough to accommodate TEXT field. TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE data types of SQL Server 2000 will be deprecated in future version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility to data types but it is recommended to use new data types which are VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX) and VARBINARY(MAX).

What's the difference between the text data type and the character varying (varchar) data types? According to the documentation. If character varying is used without length specifier, the type accepts strings of any size. The latter is a PostgreSQL extension. and. In addition, PostgreSQL provides the text type, which stores strings of any length.

Nov 15, 2010 · So with this, you can read any type's meaning: CHAR(10): is an in-row fixed length non-Unicode of size 10; NVARCHAR(256): is an in-row variable length Unicode of size up-to 256; VARCHAR(MAX): is a BLOB variable length non-Unicode; The deprecated types text and ntext correspond to the new types varchar(max) and nvarchar(max) respectively.

Aug 29, 2008 · I am using SQL Server 2005. I have a table with a text column and I have many rows in the table where the value of this column is not null, but it is empty. Trying to compare against '' yields this response: The data types text and varchar are …

Where [CastleType] is set as data type "text" in SQL Server and the query is: SELECT * FROM [Village] WHERE [CastleType] = 'foo' I get the error: The data types TEXT and VARCHAR are incompatible in the equal to operator. Can I not query this data type with a WHERE clause?

Dec 10, 2013 · SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(text_column, 900) ... While the cast/convert answers work, and while it's questionable to want to perform a distinct operation on data this large in the first place, the real fix is to stop using the TEXT data type. It has been deprecated since 2005. You should be using VARCHAR(MAX) instead, for a whole variety of reasons.