What is the maximum characters for the NVARCHAR(MAX)?

sql-server sql-server-2008 sql-server-2005
Jerameel Resco picture Jerameel Resco · Jun 21, 2012 · Viewed 294.7k times · Source

I have declared a column of type NVARCHAR(MAX) in SQL Server 2008, what would be its exact maximum characters having the MAX as the length?

Answer

marc_s picture marc_s · Jun 21, 2012

The max size for a column of type NVARCHAR(MAX) is 2 GByte of storage.

Since NVARCHAR uses 2 bytes per character, that's approx. 1 billion characters.

Leo Tolstoj's War and Peace is a 1'440 page book, containing about 600'000 words - so that might be 6 million characters - well rounded up. So you could stick about 166 copies of the entire War and Peace book into each NVARCHAR(MAX) column.

Is that enough space for your needs? :-)

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