Are there any disadvantages to always using nvarchar MAX

Question

In SQL Server 2005  are there any disadvantages to making all character fields nvarchar MAX  rather than specifying a length explicitly  e g  nvarchar 255    Apart from the obvious one that you aren t able to limit the field length at the database level

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It will make screen design harder as you will no longer be able to predict how wide your controls should be

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As was pointed out above  it is primarily a tradeoff between storage and performance  At least in most cases   However  there is at least one other factor that should be considered when choosing n varchar Max  over n varchar n   Is the data going to be indexed  such as  say  a last name    Since the MAX definition is considered a LOB  then anything defined as MAX is not available for indexing  and without an index  any lookup involving the data as predicate in a WHERE clause is going to be forced into a Full Table scan  which is the worst performance you can get for data lookups

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firstly I thought about this  but then thought again  There are performance implications  but equally it does serve as a form of documentation to have an idea what size the fields really are  And it does enforce when that database sits in a larger ecosystem  In my opinion the key is to be permissive but only within reason     ok  here s my feelings simply on the issue of business and data layer logic  It depends  if your DB is a shared resource between systems that share business logic then of course it seems a natural place to enforce such logic  but its not the BEST way to do it  the BEST way is to provide an API  this allows the interaction to be tested and keeps business logic where it belongs  it keeps systems decoupled  it keeps your tiers within a system decoupled  If however your database is supposed to be serving only one application  then lets get AGILE in thinking  what s true now  design for now  If and when such access is needed  provide an API to that data    obviously though  this is just the ideal  if you are working with an existing system the likelyhood is that you will need to do it differently at least in the short term

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The only problem I found was that we develop our applications on SQL Server 2005  and in one instance  we have to support SQL Server 2000   I just learned  the hard way that SQL Server 2000 doesn t like the MAX option for varchar or nvarchar

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My tests have shown that there are differences when selecting   CREATE TABLE t4000  a NVARCHAR 4000  NULL    CREATE TABLE tmax  a NVARCHAR MAX  NULL    DECLARE  abc4 NVARCHAR 4000    N ABC    INSERT INTO t4000 SELECT TOP 1000000  abc4     FROM     master sys all columns ac1      master sys all columns ac2   DECLARE  abc NVARCHAR MAX    N ABC    INSERT INTO tmax SELECT TOP 1000000  abc     FROM     master sys all columns ac1      master sys all columns ac2   SET STATISTICS TIME ON  SET STATISTICS IO ON   SELECT   FROM dbo t4000  SELECT   FROM dbo tmax

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Based on the link provided in the accepted answer it appears that    100 characters stored in an nvarchar MAX  field will be stored no different to 100 characters in an nvarchar 100  field - the data will be stored inline and you will not have the overhead of reading and writing data  out of row   So no worries there   If the size is greater than 4000 the data would be stored  out of row  automatically  which is what you would want  So no worries there either     However      You cannot create an index on an nvarchar MAX  column  You can use full-text indexing  but you cannot create an index on the column to improve query performance  For me  this seals the deal   it is a definite disadvantage to always use nvarchar MAX     Conclusion   If you want a kind of  universal string length  throughout your whole database  which can be indexed and which will not waste space and access time  then you could use nvarchar 4000

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Bad idea when you know the field will be in a set range- 5 to 10 character for example  I think I d only use max if I wasn t sure what the length would be  For example a telephone number would never be more than a certain number of characters   Can you honestly say you are that uncertain about the approximate length requirements for every field in your table   I do get your point though- there are some fields I d certainly consider using varchar max    Interestingly the MSDN docs sum it up pretty well      Use varchar when the sizes of the   column data entries vary considerably    Use varchar max  when the sizes of the   column data entries vary considerably    and the size might exceed 8 000 bytes    There s an interesting discussion on the issue here

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The main disadvantage I can see is that let s say you have this   Which one gives you the most information about the data needed for the UI   This              CREATE TABLE  dbo   BusData                    ID   int  IDENTITY 1 1  NOT NULL                   RecordId   nvarchar  MAX  NULL                   CompanyName   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   FirstName   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   LastName   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   ADDRESS   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   CITY   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   County   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   STATE   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   ZIP   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   PHONE   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   COUNTRY   nvarchar  MAX  NOT NULL                   NPA   nvarchar  MAX  NULL                   NXX   nvarchar  MAX  NULL                   XXXX   nvarchar  MAX  NULL                   CurrentRecord   nvarchar  MAX  NULL                   TotalCount   nvarchar  MAX  NULL                   Status   int  NOT NULL                   ChangeDate   datetime  NOT NULL               ON  PRIMARY    Or This               CREATE TABLE  dbo   BusData                    ID   int  IDENTITY 1 1  NOT NULL                   RecordId   nvarchar  50  NULL                   CompanyName   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   FirstName   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   LastName   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   ADDRESS   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   CITY   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   County   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   STATE   nvarchar  2  NOT NULL                   ZIP   nvarchar  16  NOT NULL                   PHONE   nvarchar  18  NOT NULL                   COUNTRY   nvarchar  50  NOT NULL                   NPA   nvarchar  3  NULL                   NXX   nvarchar  3  NULL                   XXXX   nvarchar  4  NULL                   CurrentRecord   nvarchar  50  NULL                   TotalCount   nvarchar  50  NULL                   Status   int  NOT NULL                   ChangeDate   datetime  NOT NULL               ON  PRIMARY

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If all of the data in a row  for all the columns  would never reasonably take 8000 or fewer characters then the design at the data layer should enforce this   The database engine is much more efficient keeping everything out of blob storage  The smaller you can restrict a row the better  The more rows you can cram in a page the better  The database just performs better when it has to access fewer pages

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One disadvantage is that you will be designing around an unpredictable variable  and you will probably ignore instead of take advantage of the internal SQL Server data structure  progressively made up of Row s   Page s   and Extent s     Which makes me think about data structure alignment in C  and that being aware of the alignment is generally considered to be a Good Thing  TM   Similar idea  different context   MSDN page for Pages and Extents  MSDN page for Row-Overflow Data

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A reason NOT to use max or text fields is that you cannot perform online index rebuilds i e  REBUILD WITH ONLINE  ON   even with SQL Server Enterprise Edition

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legacy system support  If you have a system that is using the data and it is expected to be a certain length then the database is a good place to enforce the length  This is not ideal but legacy systems are sometime not ideal   P

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This will cause a performance problem  although it may never cause any actual issues if your database is small  Each record will take up more space on the hard drive and the database will need to read more sectors of the disk if you re searching through a lot of records at once  For example  a small record could fit 50 to a sector and a large record could fit 5  You d need to read 10 times as much data from the disk using the large record

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I checked some articles and find useful test script from this  http   www sqlservercentral com Forums Topic1480639-1292-1 aspx Then changed it to compare between NVARCHAR 10  vs NVARCHAR 4000  vs NVARCHAR MAX  and I don t find speed difference when using specified numbers but when using MAX  You can test by yourself  Hope This help   SET NOCOUNT ON   --      Test Variable Assignment 1 000 000 times using NVARCHAR 10  DECLARE  SomeString NVARCHAR 10            StartTime DATETIME  --                SELECT  startTime   GETDATE     SELECT TOP 1000000          SomeString    ABC     FROM master sys all columns ac1          master sys all columns ac2   SELECT testTime  10   Duration   DATEDIFF ms  StartTime GETDATE     GO --      Test Variable Assignment 1 000 000 times using NVARCHAR 4000  DECLARE  SomeString NVARCHAR 4000            StartTime DATETIME   SELECT  startTime   GETDATE     SELECT TOP 1000000          SomeString    ABC     FROM master sys all columns ac1          master sys all columns ac2   SELECT testTime  4000   Duration   DATEDIFF ms  StartTime GETDATE     GO --      Test Variable Assignment 1 000 000 times using NVARCHAR MAX  DECLARE  SomeString NVARCHAR MAX            StartTime DATETIME   SELECT  startTime   GETDATE     SELECT TOP 1000000          SomeString    ABC     FROM master sys all columns ac1          master sys all columns ac2   SELECT testTime  MAX   Duration   DATEDIFF ms  StartTime GETDATE     GO

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Interesting link  Why use a VARCHAR when you can use TEXT   It s about PostgreSQL and MySQL  so the performance analysis is different  but the logic for  explicitness  still holds  Why force yourself to always worry about something that s relevant a small percentage of the time  If you saved an email address to a variable  you d use a  string  not a  string limited to 80 chars

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As of SQL Server 2019  NVARCHAR MAX  still does not support SCSU    Unicode compression        even when stored using In-Row data storage  SCSU was added in SQL Server 2008 and applies to any ROW PAGE-compressed tables and indices  As such  NVARCHAR MAX  can take up to twice as much physical disk space as a NVARCHAR 1  4000  field with the same text content      even when not stored in the LOB  The non-SCSU waste depends on data and language represented  Unicode Compression Implementation   SQL Server uses an implementation of the Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode  SCSU  algorithm to compress Unicode values that are stored in row or page compressed objects  For these compressed objects  Unicode compression is automatic for nchar n  and nvarchar n  columns  and is never used with nvarchar max     On the other hand  PAGE compression  since 2014  still applies to NVARCHAR MAX  columns if they are written as In-Row data   so lack of SCSU feels like a    missing optimization     Unlike SCSU  page compression results can vary dramatically based on shared leading prefixes  ie  duplicate values   However  it may still be    faster    to use NVARCHAR MAX  even with the higher IO costs with functions like OPENJSON due to avoiding the implicit conversion  This is implicit conversion overhead depends on the relative cost of usage and if the field is touched before or after filtering  This same conversion issue exists when using 2019   s UTF-8 collation in a VARCHAR MAX  column  Using NVARCHAR 1-4000  also requires N 2 bytes of the  8000 byte row quota  while NVARCHAR MAX  only requires 24 bytes  Overall design and usage need to be considered together to account for specific implementation details   In my database   data   schema  by using two columns  coalesced on read  it was possible to reduce disk space usage by  40  while still supporting overflowing text values  SCSU  while with its flaws  is an amazingly clever and underutilized method of storing Unicode more space-efficiently

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Same question was asked on MSDN Forums   Varchar max  vs Varchar 255   From the original post  much more information there    When you store data to a VARCHAR N  column  the values are physically stored in the same way  But when you store it to a VARCHAR MAX  column  behind the screen the data is handled as a TEXT value  So there is some additional processing needed when dealing with a VARCHAR MAX  value   only if the size exceeds 8000  VARCHAR MAX  or NVARCHAR MAX  is considered as a  large value type   Large value types are usually stored  out of  row   It means that the data row will have a pointer to another location where the  large value  is stored

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Sometimes you want the data type to enforce some sense on the data in it   Say for example you have a column that really shouldn t be longer than  say  20 characters   If you define that column as VARCHAR MAX   some rogue application could insert a long string into it and you d never know  or have any way of preventing it     The next time your application uses that string  under the assumption that the length of the string is modest and reasonable for the domain it represents  you will experience an unpredictable and confusing result

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Think of it as just another safety level  You can design your table without foreign key relationships - perfectly valid - and ensure existence of associated entities entirely on the business layer  However  foreign keys are considered good design practice because they add another constraint level in case something messes up on the business layer  Same goes for field size limitation and not using varchar MAX

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Interesting link  Why use a VARCHAR when you can use TEXT   It s about PostgreSQL and MySQL  so the performance analysis is different  but the logic for  explicitness  still holds  Why force yourself to always worry about something that s relevant a small percentage of the time  If you saved an email address to a variable  you d use a  string  not a  string limited to 80 chars

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It s a fair question and he did state apart from the obvious     Disadvantages could include   Performance implications  Query optimizer uses field size to determine most efficent exectution plan   1  The space alloction in extends and pages of the database are flexible  Thus when adding information to the field using update  your database would have to create a pointer if the new data is longer than the previous inserted  This the database files would become fragmented   lower performance in almost everything  from index to delete  update and inserts     http   sqlblogcasts com blogs simons archive 2006 02 28 Why-use-anything-but-varchar 2800 max 2900  aspx  Integration implications - hard for other systems to know how to integrate with your database Unpredictable growth of data Possible security issues e g  you could crash a system by taking up all disk space  There is good article here  http   searchsqlserver techtarget com tip 1 289483 sid87 gci1098157 00 html

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1  The SQL server will have to utilize more resources  allocated memory and cpu time  when dealing with nvarchar max  vs nvarchar n  where n is a number specific to the field     2  What does this mean in regards to performance   On SQL Server 2005  I queried 13 000 rows of data from a table with 15 nvarchar max  columns  I timed the queries repeatedly and then changed the columns to nvarchar 255  or less   The queries prior to the optimization averaged at 2 0858 seconds   The queries after the change returned in an average of 1 90 seconds   That was about 184 milliseconds of improvement to the basic select   query   That is an 8 8  improvement   3  My results are in concurrence with a few other articles that indicated that there was a performance difference   Depending on your database and the query  the percentage of improvement can vary   If you don t have a lot of concurrent users or very many records  then the performance difference won t be an issue for you   However  the performance difference will increase as more records and concurrent users increase

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I had a udf which padded strings and put the output to varchar max    If this was used directly instead of casting back to the appropriate size for the column being adjusted  the performance was very poor   I ended up putting the udf to an arbitrary length with a big note instead of relying on all the callers of the udf to re-cast the string to a smaller size

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The job of the database is to store data so that it can be used by the enterprise  Part of making that data useful is ensuring that it is meaningful  Allowing someone to enter an unlimited number of characters for their first name isn t ensuring meaningful data   Building these constraints into the business layer is a good idea  but that doesn t ensure that the database will remain intact  The only way to guarantee that the data rules are not violated is to enforce them at the lowest level possible in the database

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One problem is that if you are having to work with multiple versions of SQL Server  the MAX will not always work  So if you are working with legacy DB s or any other situation that involves multiple versions  you better be very careful

[sql] Are there any disadvantages to always using nvarchar(MAX)?

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