Question

I am going to store stories in nvarchar(MAX) fields in SQL Server, but I know the stories will be much longer than MAX allows, so what approach should I take? Should I split the story across multiple rows or should I skip using a database and use text files?

Answer 1

I believe the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of terms here.

nvarchar(n) is a data type where n can be a number from 1-4000. The number n in this case has a max of 4000, which adds up to 8000 bytes (2 bytes per character).

nvarchar(MAX) is a different data type altogether – the keyword MAX is a literal, and it is not a synonym for any potential value of n in my example above. Fields of this type have a maximum length of 2^31-1 characters, or over 1 billion, which adds up to over 2 billion bytes (2 bytes per character).

The same principles apply to varchar(n) and varchar(MAX), except each character may only be 1 byte, in which case the number of characters that can be stored is double. Whether it is only 1 byte depends on the collation, as Martin Smith notes in a comment!