ntext, text, and image

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.

ntext

Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum length of 2³⁰ - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters. Storage size, in bytes, is two times the number of characters entered. The SQL-92 synonym for ntext is national text.

text

Variable-length non-Unicode data in the code page of the server and with a maximum length of 2³¹-1 (2,147,483,647) characters. 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 2³¹-1 (2,147,483,647) bytes.

Remarks

These functions and statements can be used with ntext, text, or image data.

Functions	Statements
DATALENGTH	READTEXT
PATINDEX	SET TEXTSIZE
SUBSTRING	UPDATETEXT
TEXTPTR	WRITETEXT
TEXTVALID

See Also

ALTER TABLE

CAST and CONVERT

CREATE TABLE

Data Type Conversion

Data Types

DECLARE @local_variable

DELETE

INSERT

LIKE

SET @local_variable

UPDATE

Using Unicode Data