This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
Download Microsoft Edge
More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Fixed and variable-length data types for storing large non-Unicode and Unicode character and binary data. Unicode data uses the Unicode UCS-2 character set.
Important
The
ntext
,
text
, and
image
data types will be removed in a future version of SQL Server. Avoid using these data types in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use them. Use
nvarchar(max)
,
varchar(max)
, and
varbinary(max)
instead.
Arguments
ntext
Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum string length of 2^30 - 1 (1,073,741,823) bytes. Storage size, in bytes, is two times the string length that is entered. The ISO synonym for
ntext
is
national text
.
Variable-length non-Unicode data in the code page of the server and with a maximum string length of 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647). When the server code page uses double-byte characters, the storage is still 2,147,483,647 bytes. Depending on the character string, the storage size may be less than 2,147,483,647 bytes.
image
Variable-length binary data from 0 through 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647) bytes.
The following functions and statements can be used with
ntext
,
text
, or
image
data.
Functions
Statements
Caution
When dropping columns using the deprecated
ntext
data type, the cleanup of the deleted data occurs as a serialized operation on all rows. The cleanup can require a large amount of time. When dropping an
ntext
column in a table with lots of rows, update the
ntext
column to NULL value first, then drop the column. You can run this option with parallel operations and make it much faster.
See also
Data Types (Transact-SQL)
LIKE (Transact-SQL)
SET
@local_variable
(Transact-SQL)
Collation and Unicode Support
Next steps
CAST and CONVERT (Transact-SQL)
Data Type Conversion (Database Engine)
ALTER TABLE (Transact-SQL)
