Steve Jones - SSC Editor (2/11/2010)
jparker2 (2/11/2010)
This has already been resolved.If you want to work with strings greater than 8K then declare them as XML or TEXT.
In Access use a Note data type.
Text has been deprecated. varchar(max) is what you use, which allows 2^31 - 1 bytes. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176089.aspx) That's a good change, but if all the code and functions we have don't handle that 8001st byte, that's an issue.
XML doesn't work everywhere, and I'm not sure I think that's the answer.
2^31-1 is still a restriction that can cause problems. Back in 2003 a limit of 2^32-1 was causing problems for me in another context, making life pretty complicated, and if we had tried to put that data in SQL Server (presumably using text or image at that date, as there was no varbinary(max) and no filestore data) the 2^31-1 limitation would have made it impossible. I don't think the binary blobs that arise in science, and in entertainment, and sometimes elsewhere have got any smaller since then.
I agree that XML doesn't always provide an answer (in my experience a decision to use XML has more often been part of the problem than part of the solution).
Tom