Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Regarding ntext, nchar and nvarchar

These are basically used for textual information related data types. There is a strong recommendation not to use ntext as it is not going to be supported.

These are their definitions from Microsoft Documentation.

ntext (National Text):
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

nchar [ ( n ) ]
Fixed-length Unicode string data. n defines the string length and must be a value from 1 through 4,000. The storage size is two times n bytes. When the collation code page uses double-byte characters, the storage size is still n bytes. Depending on the string, the storage size of n bytes can be less than the value specified for n. The ISO synonyms for nchar are national char and national character..
1
nvarchar [ ( n | max ) ]
Variable-length Unicode string data. n defines the string length and can be a value from 1 through 4,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB). The storage size, in bytes, is two times the actual length of data entered + 2 bytes. The ISO synonyms for nvarchar are national char varying and national character varying.

ntext is supposed to be discontinued, but in actuality it is still present as a choice in data types listing even in SQL Server 16.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Do you know what you installed while custom installing SQL Server 2022?

 When you install any software in Windows OS, the key information gets into the Registry and some of which you can look up in the control pa...