String Data

Character strings data types

Character strings data types allow you to store either fixed-length (char) or variable-length data (varchar). The text data type can store non-Unicode data in the code page of the server.

Data Type	Lower limit	Upper limit	Memory
char	0 chars	8000 chars	n bytes
varchar	0 chars	8000 chars	n bytes + 2 bytes
varchar (max)	0 chars	2^31 chars	n bytes + 2 bytes
text	0 chars	2,147,483,647 chars	n bytes + 4 bytes
What about Ü or Ň?

Unicode character string data types

Unicode character string data types store either fixed-length (nchar) or variable-length (nvarchar) Unicode character data.

Data Type	Lower limit	Upper limit	Memory
nchar	0 chars	4000 chars	2 times n bytes
nvarchar	0 chars	4000 chars	2 times n bytes + 2 bytes
ntext	0 chars	1,073,741,823 char	2 times the string length

Binary string data types

The binary data types stores fixed and variable length binary data.

Data Type	Lower limit	Upper limit	Memory
binary	0 bytes	8000 bytes	n bytes
varbinary	0 bytes	8000 bytes	The actual length of data entered + 2 bytes
image	0 bytes	2,147,483,647 bytes

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