ntext, text, and image (Transact-SQL)

Important

ntext, text, and image data types will be removed in a future version of Microsoft 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.

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 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.

  • 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.

Remarks

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

Functions

Statements

DATALENGTH (Transact-SQL)

READTEXT (Transact-SQL)

PATINDEX (Transact-SQL)

SET TEXTSIZE (Transact-SQL)

SUBSTRING (Transact-SQL)

UPDATETEXT (Transact-SQL)

TEXTPTR (Transact-SQL)

WRITETEXT (Transact-SQL)

TEXTVALID (Transact-SQL)

 

See Also

Reference

CAST and CONVERT (Transact-SQL)

Data Types (Transact-SQL)

LIKE (Transact-SQL)

SET @local\_variable (Transact-SQL)

Concepts

Data Type Conversion (Database Engine)

Collation and Unicode Support