Question

Cannot use text, ntext, or image columns in the ‘inserted’ and ‘deleted’ tables.

What should be the workaround in this case? 🙁

Answer 1

As of SQL Server 2005, TEXT/NTEXT/IMAGE are deprecated – you should use the (N)VARCHAR(MAX) and VARBINARY(MAX) data types instead.

(N)VARCHAR(MAX) (see MSDN docs here) and VARBINARY(MAX) allow up to 2 GByte of data

From the MSDN docs:

nvarchar [ ( n | max ) ]

Variable-length Unicode character data. n can be a value from 1 through
4,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes. (= 2 GB)

The (N)VARCHAR(MAX) types also allow all the usual T-SQL string function to work on them – something that wasn’t the case with (N)TEXT at all.

As this MSDN article shows, the replacement types are supported in triggers, too:

SQL Server 2008 does not allow for
text, ntext, or image column
references in the inserted and deleted
tables for AFTER triggers. However,
these data types are included for
backward compatibility purposes only.
The preferred storage for large data
is to use the varchar(max),
nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max) data
types. Both AFTER and INSTEAD OF
triggers support varchar(max),
nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max) data
in the inserted and deleted tables.