text field in sql server 2000

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text field in sql server 2000

Betty Sun

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January 19, 2007 at 1:53 pm

#174569

Hi all,
I am trying to use text field to save a chunk of data from our on-line application.
The purpose the data will be save in the database in case of the transaction is not successful, so we don't have to ask user to send ud application again. we can recover the interrupted transaction based on the data was saved in the system.
What is the max length of the text field. I saw that in our system, the length is set up to 17 while the length of the characters is many more than that.

Thank you.
Betty

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jezemine SSCrazy Eights Points: 8109 More actions · Answer 1

if you are using the text datatype, there is no practical limit to how big a string will fit in it. same with ntext.

the ones that are limited are char/varchar/nchar/nvarchar. these are limited to 8000 bytes.

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323546 More actions · Answer 2

What is the max length of the text field. I saw that in our system, the length is set up to 17 while the length of the characters is many more than that.

if you sp_help a table and see the text field has a "length" of 16;

that is size in bytes of the pointer that has the address of where the data is really stored. the "length" property can be misleading if you are refering to anything that is not a CHAR,VARCHAR field.

Column_name	Type	Computed	Length	Prec	Scale	Nullable	TrimTrailingBlanks	FixedLenNullInSource	Collation
ATBLKEY	int	no	4	10	0	no	(n/a)	(n/a)	NULL
ANBR	varchar	no	18			no	no	no	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
ANAME	varchar	no	40			yes	no	no	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
ADESCRIP	text	no	16			yes	(n/a)	(n/a)	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

Lowell

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Betty Sun SSCrazy Points: 2442 More actions · Answer 3

Hello jezemine and Lowell,

Thank you both for clarifying this for me. Very very helpful.

Betty