How many chars are available in nvarchar(MAX)

Question

declare @string nvarchar(MAX) = ''

How many chars are available in @string?

Possible duplicate of [What is the maximum characters for the NVARCHAR(MAX)?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11131958/what-is-the-maximum-characters-for-the-nvarcharmax) — underscore_d, Feb 22 '18 at 12:17
@mod: better/older duplicate: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4270049/what-is-the-maximum-number-of-characters-that-nvarcharmax-will-hold — underscore_d, Feb 22 '18 at 12:18

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 10 '11 at 02:25

8

nvarchar(MAX) will hold up to 2GB which is about 1 billion characters since it is unicode

in your case it is 0

also take a look at this, datalength counts storage, len counts characters, for varchar these will be the same

declare @string nvarchar(MAX) = ''
select datalength(@string), LEN(@string)
GO

declare @string nvarchar(MAX) = '1'
select datalength(@string), LEN(@string)

answered Mar 10 '11 at 02:25

SQLMenace

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What happens it I declare `varchar(MAX)` instead `nvarchar(MAX)`? – edgarmtze Mar 10 '11 at 02:27
in that case you can go up to 2 billion characters – SQLMenace Mar 10 '11 at 02:27
1

@darkcminor: 1 billion characters for NVARCHAR(MAX) is about 200 times the volume of Tolstoj's `War and Peace` - should be enough for **most** cases.... – marc_s Mar 10 '11 at 07:20

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 10 '11 at 02:24

You have about two billion bytes worth of Unicode characters to play with. From the MSDN documentation for char and varchar:

Variable-length, non-Unicode character data. n can be a value from 1 through 8,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes. The storage size is the actual length of data entered + 2 bytes. The data entered can be 0 characters in length. The ISO synonyms for varchar are char varying or character varying.

How many chars are available in nvarchar(MAX)

2 Answers2